Year in review: 2021
Every new year carries with it some vague hope of renewal, better times ahead, and you thought it’d be that way as we moved into 2021. But more barriers and locked doors waited for us.
You look at him across the room, this child, your eight-year-old son, curled into the corner of a couch, gripping an iPad and hypnotised by something on YouTube – a colony of tapeworms being expelled from a human body, water bottle pranks and manga monsters. Beyond him, through the glass doors, it’s a warm and clear day, the possibilities infinite for a boy, but he is crawling through some tunnel with a dark creature and the stakes are high – the world may very well be coming to an end.
On the nearby kitchen bench is a new 10-pack of disposable blue and white face masks. A tub of hand sanitiser. An open letter officially reminding his older brother and sister that they have impending Covid vaccine injections.
In school the previous week this boy had performed with his class in his annual school concert in a near-empty Covid-safe hall. No proud parents filming with their phones. No wild applause, despite the unevenness of the performance – squats and jumps out of time, dancers colliding, a shoe flying off a hoof.
There was none of that.
Two nights later we gather around his iPad, home to those worms and monsters, and watch his spaghetti-thin figure wiggling about among rows of his classmates in a routine he’s been rehearsing for weeks. He’s a mess of limbs, but when it’s over we all applaud at the screen and, in the real world, his smiling cheeks turn pink.
You watch him, across the room, and try to imagine what the past year has been like for him, this extraordinary game of cat and mouse we’ve all been caught in, riding the tides of the pandemic, pivoting at the arrival of a newsflash or a government text on our phones, tripping through sudden thickets of rules and regulations.
Every day it seems like someone has added new and complicated addenda and footnotes and small print to the bottom of what are – or used to be – the contracts of our ordinary lives.
You watch your little child and try to resist the cliché: well, things were better in our day. But seeing him with his sprig of tawny brown hair, fixed to his spot, unwilling despite multiple invitations to step outside and get some fresh air, to cycle, to kick a ball at the beach, it’s hard not to remember yourself at eight, and that desire to be anywhere but inside the house, each day a spin cycle of sunburn and drenching rain, stubbed toes, scuffed knees, bush hikes and creek swimming. Home was where you repaired and recovered from a day’s play, then went out and did it all over again.
Here, though, you wonder what this boy will recall in the future slideshow of his childhood memories. Interiors. An animated environment on a screen more inviting, and less dangerous, than the real one. Meeting masked people whose faces you can never properly appreciate, and thinking a naked visage is somehow peculiar and wrong. Asking constant questions about how to behave in any given social situation, sensing there is this invisible monster everywhere, ready to strike you down.
And knowing that when the government or the local council or some other distant authority figure gives orders you do what they say, or the police might come and knock on your door.
He is not a boy without humour.
“Dad, you know doughnuts?”
“Yes, I know doughnuts.”
“I like them.”
“I know you do. You like those bags of doughnut holes you can buy, too, don’t you?”
“Yeah. But I’ve been thinking.”
“What’s that.”
“A doughnut without a hole… would have to be a no-nut.”
This boy was about to turn seven when the novel coronavirus became the backdrop to his life. He’s now hurtling towards nine, and he could be forgiven if, in a decade or two, he saw his boyhood as some indefinable wound, fussed about and fretted over and always on the brink of infection. The sense that there had been something ever-present outside, a menace, and that to survive it you had to turn in on yourself and be careful about life, rather than gloriously reckless or embracing.
Every new year carries with it some vague hope of renewal, better times ahead, and you thought it’d be that way as we moved into 2021. But more blocks and barriers and locked doors waited for us, and for this boy, who has gone slowly but steadily from daredevil to silkworm, safe in his cocoon.
You watch, and you wonder.
In December 2020, having been mired in this new virus paradigm for eight months and scraping the barrel for any news of hope, you remember the words of Australian National University demographer Dr Liz Allen. “Covid is a major disrupter to the way we live our lives and how we view ourselves. It won’t be a long-term trend. Once there is a solution to Covid then people will start returning to the cities, but whether they are the same people as those that left is another story.”
You cling to that single phrase: once there is a solution. But there’s that other one too: whether we are the same people.
Figures from the federal health department provide a snapshot of where we’re really at as of 3pm on Thursday, December 31, 2020. And it looks promising, in the sense that a weather forecast might predict no further rain despite the prevalence of grey clouds. As of that moment on New Year’s Eve Australia has had a total of 28,408 cases of Covid-19, including 909 deaths, and has about 217 active cases. The figures show that new cases have been low since September 2020.
However, an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey from earlier in December reveals that Covid continues to weigh heavily on the minds of people across the country. “In December, 92 per cent of people thought about Covid-19, 59 per cent actively sought information about Covid-19 and 28 per cent felt overwhelmed because of Covid-19, in the last week.” Overwhelmed. Almost 30 per cent. Yet you can also interpret this as good news, given that six months earlier the same survey showed that 57 per cent of people felt overwhelmed.
It is, after all, New Year’s Eve, traditionally a time for optimism: we’ll be stepping into something new, and different, and better, than yesterday. That was an awful year. This one is going to be different.
So things look bright on New Year’s Day when you wake to find that the single biggest issue facing you isn’t Covid-19, but the fact that the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, has had its lyrics tweaked. According to an official proclamation ordered and signed by Governor-General David Hurley and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the edict, “effective immediately”, states that we will now sing “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are one and free”. Not “young” and free.
The PM somehow links this word change to the national character under the duress of the pandemic. That the word swap has fixed the anthem’s flat tyre. “During the past year we have showed once again the indomitable spirit of Australians and the united effort that has always enabled us to prevail as a nation. It is time to ensure this great unity is reflected more fully in our national anthem,” the Prime Minister says.
We are one and free. At least it’s less of a tongue-twister than: We are indomitable and free.
Anything is better than the dawn of 2020, when we woke to a nation quite literally on fire. That’s when we really witnessed genuine Australian spirit. So we are officially declared indomitable, as one, albeit no longer young.
And Covid-19 infection numbers are slowing. Maybe the worst really is behind us at the beginning of 2021. Maybe the rhythm of our lives is returning to what it used to be. Maybe those invisible monsters outside are finally in retreat. Soon, the only overwhelmed Australians will be our Test cricketers, on a hiding to nothing against a young and brilliant touring squad from India.
It’s during this fake dawn that you make the mad holiday road trip to Sydney to see relatives and friends, cut short last time by the nation’s horrifying Black Summer. Again, it doesn’t feel the same. Masks on and off. Social distancing and queues for roadside fast food. An argument at a hotel counter in Port Macquarie where a man is defending his right to go mask-free. Wiping petrol pump nozzles before touching them and filling up. Why did life have to be so antiseptic, so medical?
There’s a mice plague in western NSW and Queensland, where the rodents are gnawing through groceries on supermarket shelves, but it’s more amusing than anything given we’re mice in our own plague and have lived it (and the wholesale fleecing of toilet rolls, pasta and rice from shops in the early days of the pandemic by other faceless rodents) for close to a year.
By March, Covid statistics have barelybudged. Total cases are up by just a few hundred to 29,296, and total deaths remain unchanged at 909. We’re doing well, you think, compared to places like the United States, where they’re averaging almost 60,000 new cases per day.
We’re indomitable. We are one. Thank goodness for strong political leadership on both a state and federal level. Our premiers and territory bosses have their shoulders to the wheel. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing Annastacia and Gladys and Dan, all of them in clear command of a difficult situation.
It’s easy to forget that life goes on in a time of plague, but for any external news to break through the ceaseless white noise of Covid, it has to detonate with considerable force. And that’s what happens in early March.
This news is about a pathogen that’s been around a lot longer than the coronavirus, and that’s the reckless mistreatment and abuse of women, this time in the halls of Federal Parliament. That 81m, 220-tonne flagpole of polished Newcastle steel that sits atop Capital Hill in Canberra suddenly becomes a lightning rod for historical sexual assaults against women, let alone generations of misogyny, old boys’ clubs, thwarted promotions and ambitions and innumerable instances of inequality in the workplace. Women, and it seems much of the nation, have had enough.
In mid-February, Liberal Party staffer Brittany Higgins alleges she’d been raped in a ministerial wing in Parliament House in 2019 by a male colleague after a work party. She claims Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office knew about the allegations before they were made public in the media. He denies it.
The PM apologises to Higgins over the government’s handling of her complaint, claiming he is “shattered” by the claims, then announces investigations into the “professional” culture of Parliament House. The story goes around the world and hits a raw nerve in our national character. Aren’t we the country of the fair go? Until it comes to women working in the world of boorish men.
A week after Higgins’ revelations, the ABC publishes details of a letter sent to the PM and members of parliament across the political spectrum. It alleges that a girl, 16, had been raped in Sydney in 1988 by a man who currently holds a senior position in Morrison’s cabinet. The woman at the centre of the allegation has subsequently taken her own life. On March 3,
Attorney-General Christian Porter, during a press conference, identifies himself as the minister named in the letter. He emphatically denies the allegation.
Prime Minister Morrison appoints Australia’s sex discrimination minister Kate Jenkins to oversee a full review of Federal Parliament’s workplace culture. “In my time working in this area and particularly looking in workplaces over the [past] 30 years, I’ve never seen any moment like this,” Jenkins reportedly says. “I think our community is changing… we’re at a turning point.”
An emotional Morrison reacts to what has quickly turned into a political crisis for his government. “I am shocked and I am disgusted. It is shameful. It is just absolutely shameful,” he says. “We must get this house in order – we must recognise this problem [and] we must fix it.”
The government is desperate to talk about the Covid vaccine rollout and crow about the strength of the Australian economy in the midst of the pandemic, but instead the sex scandal has set Capital Hill alight. The revelations in turn trigger several other inquiries, including an examination of workplace culture specifically within the Coalition. And another into the competency of the complaints process for political staffers. The police launch an investigation into Brittany Higgins’ complaint.
Then in late March, Christian Porter is dumped as attorney-general and takes up the industry, science and technology portfolio. Within a few months, he’ll be giving the keynote address at the National Artificial Intelligence Summit. “Professionally, I am a lawyer,” the minister will tell delegates. “And so [it is estimated that]… 22 per cent of lawyers’ jobs could conceivably be automated with the assistance of AI…”
It seems to already be happening to government ministers.
Whether it’s by chance or because we’re fed upwith Covid news or we’re bored by the stasis that the pandemic has dumped us in, the Canberra scandal jolts some of us back to our traditional scepticism about our elected officials. We’ve been so busy doing what we’re told and jumping when our leaders ask that we’ve forgotten we’re supposed to be a nation of rule-snubbing, moon-flashing larrikins. As far back as May 2020, we were forewarned about giving our leaders too much rope when it came to our personal freedoms during this national health crisis. And that our national response to the pandemic had exposed some structural flaws in that rickety thing called our Federation.
Charles Sturt University Centre for Law and Justice director Mark Nolan said the pandemic had exposed the need for Australia’s federation to work on a national and state level. Speaking at the end of Law Week, he reflected on how the past six months put legal concerns front and centre in the nation’s response to disasters. “Among Australian residents there has been a large degree of confusion caused by the eight different sets of state and territory restrictions, which have been enforced by different police forces operating under different orders made under different public health legislation,” said Nolan.
“New Zealand is a legal system blessed by the absence of a federation; having just one source of emergency response law, criminal law, public health law and policing power, making things much simpler in a crisis than is the case in Australia. Ours is messier, constitutionally speaking…”
Our great novelist Thomas Keneally is also left scratching his chin over the apparent rise of the power of the states and territories throughout the pandemic imbroglio. “…there is an air that the federal equation is under stress, and given the supineness of the PM in the vaccine rollout, the states give an impression – I believe more perceived than real – that they are willing to go their own way,” Keneally writes.
“What has been shown though, is that as much power as might have been passed to Canberra, the states are not a dead letter, for all their often bicameral manifestations of mediocrity and dunderheadedness.”
It’s as if the nation’s federal head of the house is suddenly having to deal with a brood of feisty teenagers, from Queensland to Perth, riven with hormones, stomping feet and clamouring to have their voices and opinions heard.
There is a building caterwauling of divided views on science, vaccinations, prevalence of masks, quarantining, travel or absence thereof, and the previously unthinkable closure of borders, manned by phalanxes of police and defence personnel. Families in many states are again separated, lives are disrupted, income sacrificed, and the previously unrestricted circulation of people and commerce is now sporadically clotted.
How did it happen that we now instantly acquiesce to every dictate, website update and emergency text issued by our state leaders, all born out of a slippery and often grey-edged metaphorical playbook that can change its orders and mandates within the hour? Is this what demographer Liz Allen meant when she wondered whether over time during this crisis we might not be the same people that emerged at the other end?
The rationale for our subservience, more often than not, is that premiers are doing everything to “protect” their people from the ravages of Covid, as if the whole country has suddenly engaged in this massive State of Origin sporting contest. However, as it has dragged on, nobody seems to know what game is being played anymore.
You hear anecdotes coming out of Tweed Heads in far northern NSW, on the Queensland border, about the fiasco that is Thomson Street, which demarks the direct southern rim of the border. It runs parallel with Dixon Street, which is technically in Coolangatta, Queensland. For weeks it has been separated by large orange plastic bollards, and on any given day, friends and relatives from North and South meet at the bollards, exchange greetings, sometimes gifts or goods, and even clamber over for more personal contact.
You can’t help but think this small stretch of road is emblematic of the nation with just a thin, penetrable membrane between reality and dream. A portal between how we once lived and how we live now. How did it come to this, the Ballad of Thomson Street?
“Before this pandemic, no one would have cited freedom of movement – between states and to and from overseas – as being important or significant to Australians, because it was just assumed,” Frank Bongiorno, a professor of history at the Australian National University in Canberra, reportedly says. “But those rights have been drastically reduced, and that will forever change people’s conceptions of where they fit in the political order and even how they relate to authority.”
You watch, and you wonder.
In early July, a momentary ray of sunshine inthe dead of winter. Under a leaden London sky, Australian tennis player Ash Barty takes her first Wimbledon ladies’ single crown – in the footsteps of her hero, legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who also won her first title there, albeit 50 years earlier.
You stare in awe and a little nostalgia at the huge, mask-less crowd in full voice, human beings shoulder to shoulder. And a second ray of sunshine from the perfect teeth of a smiling Mission Impossible movie star, Tom Cruise. Within a fortnight that glorious moment is a distant memory. Federal government statistics reveal that Covid infections are not only on the rise, but dangerously so.
This is life now.
There are the things you do day to day, from preparing school lunches to working to dropping the car off for a service to marrying to renovating a house to tending to a garden and always, somewhere just beyond your vision, are these statistics, these numbers and graphs smouldering at the deep heart of a fire you never started. And seemingly nobody knows how to put it out.
Well into winter, the NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian announces a strict two-week lockdown for Greater Sydney and its neighbouring regions. Ten days before, a Delta variant cluster that started with an airport limousine driver had grown to almost 100 cases, starting out in the city’s eastern suburbs before rapidly spreading west. The lockdown will be months, not weeks.
And on July 15 Melbourne enters its fifth lockdown in the Covid era. It will last 12 days. A week after it finishes, the Victorian capital will retreat into yet another lockdown, this one of epic proportions. (By the end, the total of the city’s cumulative lockdowns will establish a world record of 262 days, pipping Buenos Aires at 245.)
Our two biggest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – are cut off from the world in a move that will shock, well, the world. It prompts the US Atlantic magazine to ask: “Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?”
In July, national active Covid cases jump to 2857, up from 317 the previous month. Delta is on the attack. You ask yourself an even bigger question. After almost 18 months of living in the shadow of Covid, have we become complacent not just about the virus but about death itself?
Experts around the world are warning of “Covid complacency” in humans after such a lengthy struggle with the virus and the relentless vigilance we’re all expected to maintain. Who can blame people chafing against the dramatic changes to their lifestyles, acting irrationally out of fear, or anger, or confusion?
And what about the virus death toll, not just in our own country, but across the planet? How can anyone grasp the magnitude of these numbers? Death, via the virus or otherwise, doesn’t stop.
By mid-year, we’ve lost many of our own greats: music maestro Michael Gudinski; singer Doug Parkinson; fashion designer Carla Zampatti; rugby league legends Tommy Raudonikis and Bob Fulton; former federal Opposition leader Andrew Peacock; Olympic swimmer John Konrads; cherished actor Lorrae Desmond; and flamboyant medical entrepreneur Geoffrey Edelsten.
And while the news that Brisbane has won the rights to host the 2032 Summer Olympics is wonderful, the moment hardly elicits the sort of national fervour that accompanied the crowning of Sydney as the 2000 Olympic City. You’re happy for beautiful Brisbane. It will stage an extraordinary games. But one of the first of your reactions in the pall of mortality that has come with Covid is to do some quick mathematics. How old will you be when the games actually kick off? Will you be around to enjoy the subtropical sporting extravaganza?
This is what Covid has done. You watch the clock more than ever before.
“Hey,” you say to your manga boy on the couch. “You’ll be old enough to compete in the Brisbane Olympics if you want to. Do you want to be in the Olympics?” He briefly looks up from the screen.
“Not really,” he says.
The afterglow of the Brisbane announcement then blossoms into an actual Olympics – the Summer Games in Japan (and befitting the languor of the Covid Age, the XXXII Olympiad is still branded 2020). For two weeks from July 23, we sit deep in our caves at the foot of the TV, transfixed, thrilled, moved to tears at the sight of fit, virus-free young human bodies competing against each other in everything from high jump to surfing, cycling to table tennis. Our quarantined eyes can barely absorb all the colour and movement. Watching the games is akin to taking a mental vacation, a stale room suddenly pumped full of fresh air. Never has sport seemed so necessary.
You Zoom family and friends in Melbourne and Sydney and they appear on the screen, as their lockdowns progress, as pallid prisoners might seem when they’re required to remotely attend a court hearing via video link.
As the weeks drag on, and heads of hair grow shaggier, and smiles more difficult to maintain, they have become, you realise, those indomitable Australians that the Prime Minister referred to on New Year’s Day. They are the embodiment of sacrifice for the greater good. They are bunkered down as a viral cyclone rages around them. Federal health department figures show that as of August 31, the nation has 19,133 active Covid cases, and by the end of September that jumps to 21,428. Our national attention shifts from lockdown hell to the nirvana of double-dose vaccinations. The jab is our path out of the wilderness. You sit in a clinic waiting for your second needle opposite two elderly gentlemen also in line for their jabs. “Wasn’t going to bother with it,” one says to the other. “Then they said I couldn’t go to the pub without it. So here I am.”
In your own neck of the woods, lockdown orders arrive via text message. A few hours later, you’re sealed off from the world. Again.
Your kids shrug it off. Time off school is no longer a novelty. Home schooling is met with a wry grin that says: like that’s going to happen. This loss of freedom is now something that must be endured. You suggest, without thinking: let’s shoot down to Sydney and see Nana and Grandpa; let’s grab a cheap flight to Melbourne so you can meet your baby cousin.
We can’t, your wife says flatly.
And then you remember.
In September a diplomatic rowflares over Australia cancelling a $55 billion contract with the French to build our next fleet of diesel-electric submarines. But to millions of Australians in prolonged lockdown it’s met with a resounding French-like pfffft.
Indeed, cracks are starting to appear in both Melbourne and Sydney. Public protests flare over this seemingly endless incarceration. Constructions workers wail against mandatory vaccination orders. Banners are waved and arrests are made. And as if the burden wasn’t already enough, mother nature had to give Melburnians, on September 22, another tap on the shoulder to remind them who was boss in the form of an earthquake.
Less than a fortnight later, another quake hits NSW, this time with the sudden resignation of Premier Berejiklian. She had become our favourite Covid über-Aunt. The one you rush to for safety when there is a scary electrical storm outside. The one who makes everything all right with her no-fuss, calming wisdom. And then she is gone, unceremoniously hooked from the Covid stage over an ICAC investigation.
And then just as suddenly, in October, the people of Melbourne and Sydney are liberated from their lockdowns. You expected – what? Scenes similar to the French crowding the Champs-Élysée when the Americans drove in on tanks and jeeps in 1944 and liberated Paris? People dancing in the streets and women grabbing soldiers for a smooch in the name of freedom? No. In Sydney, just after the stroke of midnight, people queued at their hairdressers, moist-eyed at the prospect of a professional snip. Lockdowns clearly affect people in many strange and varied ways.
More death. In late October the nation winces at the passing of the great entertainer Bert Newton. He was us. He was the laugh track to our lives. His loss is profoundly unfunny, and caps a pretty humourless year.
And just when you think you’re out of the woods, along comes the Omicron variant, yet another version of the virus rolled out like some new model of car. The Omicron XL, faster than the Delta Coupe.
Christmas decorations start appearing in shops and supermarkets. Around we go again. One set of the kids’ grandparents has been seeing out the pandemic in an apartment on the Gold Coast. The Queensland government announces its border fortress is open, just in time for Christmas. You call the grandparents at Main Beach and tell them there is no longer a need to meet in Thomson Street on Christmas Day and pass gifts and mugs of eggnog over the orange bollards.
He rises from the couch, this boy, having spent the past hour watching the Japanese anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. It follows the adventures of Jaden Yuki, schooled at the Duel Academy where he trains in the Duel Monsters field. The child explains that in the fourth and final year at the academy, the duellists have returned from an alternative dimension, and Jaden has become solitary and listless from everything he’s experienced over the years of fighting monsters. The fun and thrill of duelling is no longer there. He only does what he has to in order to survive.
Would Yuki make it through the Year of the Pivot? Living by the clock and the calendar, tangled in statistics and regulations, permanently shadowed by graph columns of infection and death statistics, school and Saturday sport and social get-togethers all seemingly belonging to some distant arcadia, and official government texts appearing on your phone without warning – move left, move right, forward, backward, stay where you are until further notice.
“Do you talk about Covid at school with your mates?” you ask.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think happens if you get Covid?”
“You die.”
“Do you like to stay inside more because of Covid?”
“Yeah. But it’s not so good because you run out of toilet rolls.”
“I see.”
He says it’s normal now to see grown-ups wearing masks all the time. But he has a wish.
“I’d like to live in a house in the forest, just us and nobody else.”
“Really?” you ask.
“With trees and cows and big fields and just us.”
“You want to be away from everyone else?”
“Yeah.”
“Because of Covid?”
“Yeah.”
He returns to the couch and the world of Jaden Yuki.
Another new year looms.
You watch, and you wonder.
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