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Life in isolation: Portraits of a society in lockdown
Meet some of the Victorians cut off from friends and family under strict quarantine and hear how they are managing to cope in these strange and terrible times.
By Rachael Dexter and Justin McManus
Jane Marshall who is battling breast cancer and is self isolating to avoid exposure to coronavirus.Credit: Justin McManus
With her legs crossed on the bed in her flat in Footscray, Jane Marshall looks like any other person trapped at home, laptop glowing, safe behind glass and brick from the invisible beast that threatens to kill her.
She has undergone two operations and one round of chemotherapy for breast cancer since January this year. In the coming months there are three more rounds of chemotherapy and a bout of radiation to endure.
And she will most likely endure them alone.
Across the city, people are isolating. Homes and hotels have overnight become quarantine centres - with many trapped in spaces either by force of law or, like Jane, fear for life.
And the desire to protect both family and strangers is growing. If you doubt it, look inside the North Coburg home of Miriam Jones, where a sense of integrity and purpose is helping to add meaning to time spent alone.
In Melbourne's northern fringe, a young man in his twenties moves behind two thin plastic sheets that section off a house that was once his home, trying to protect his family on the other side from a virus that might have made his body a host while he was in Los Angeles.
And in Pascoe Vale, an Italian widow is tearing up, thinking of an Easter when she might once again be able to break bread with family.
Jane Marshall, 50
Footscray
"It doesn't feel safe for me to be outside anymore," says Ms Marshall, sitting atop pristine white bed sheets, in the Footscray townhouse she's barely left for two months.
The coronavirus outbreak has made her fight with cancer even harder, with her weakened immune system putting her at a high risk of serious illness due to COVID-19.
"Since the virus I won't go in a supermarket, I won't go in an Uber, anywhere in enclosed spaces or surfaces," she says.
Jane fills her days blogging about her experience for other breast cancer patients and speaking with friends, who she has, ironically, never had so much contact with.
"We all live these lives where we're working 10-, 12-hour days and people spend their whole time apologising to their friends for not being available because they're 'too busy'," she says.
Hugs from others are what she is missing most, but she is pushing to find deeper meaning of her own.
Jane Marshall with her dogs Maggie and Morgaine.Credit: Justin McManus
"I think a lot of people when they are faced with hardship in their lives, that's the moment you realise you have a lot more strength on the inside than you realised.
"Even though you might feel fear initially, when you go inside yourself you realise you've got resources, you've got resilience, you've got strength that you probably didn't realise you had."
Adam Smith tested positive for COVID-19 after returning from New York. He is recovering alone in a one-bedroom serviced apartment.Credit: Justin McManus
Adam Smith, 41
Ivanhoe
Adam Smith's symptoms first began to show on a flight home to Melbourne from New York, now the centre of America's coronavirus outbreak.
Waking up in a rented apartment the day after his arrival, fever hit. After testing positive to COVID-19, he now must wait until he is symptom-free for at least three days before he's allowed to re-enter the world.
Far from being shunned for his illness, Adam says he's been overwhelmed by the kindness of staff at the apartment building, who leave food and deliveries at his door. He says even the building manager calls him every second day to check up on him.
"This is not what they signed up for," he says. "They were hotel workers and now they're almost like front-line health workers".
Although Adam's mid-life "gap year" in the Big Apple was cut short, he considers himself very fortunate. He has been welcomed back to his job working for the government in aiding small businesses during COVID-19.
"The sad part is there's plenty of work to do there".
Miriam Jones catching some sun and fresh air on day six of isolation.Credit: Justin McManus
Miriam Jones, 44
North Coburg
Reflective, productive and spacious. That is how pilates instructor and teacher mentor Miram Jones describes her two weeks of enforced solitude at home after returning from a holiday in Vietnam last month.
Despite having lost nearly all her income, not being able to access Centrelink and being separated from her 11-year-old daughter, she still hasn't felt hopeless or bleak.
"Quite the opposite. Like I felt an incredible amount of purpose, to have an absolute integrity in everything I'm doing."
Miriam Jones seeing out her quarantine period after returning from Vietnam.Credit: Justin McManus
"What else can you do other than go, 'well, currently there's no other distractions, the only thing that can make me lose it right now is me'."
"The integrity was just me being in my own company. And if I can't be in my own company in integrity, what kind of teacher trainer am I?
"What kind of friend am I? What kind of human am I out there in the world if I can't even be in my own company in integrity?"
Marlene Scerri is particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.Credit: Justin McManus
Marlene Scerri, 70
Reservoir
"Our people have always had mobs together, always spoke together in groups and everything, and now we're still doing the same on Facebook," says Marlene Scerri, 70.
The Gunai-Guditjamara textile artist is bunkered down in her son's unit in Reservoir in Melbourne's north and has been mulling over the enormous health gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that has been laid bare by the pandemic.
Non-Indigenous Australians aged over 65 have been warned that they face a higher chance of serious illness if they contract the virus.
But for Australia's first nation people, that warning applies to those aged over 50. Marlene finds it ironic.
"Aboriginal people to start off with, in the very, very start, were very healthy and it was white people that brought disease here in the first place," she says.
Marlene says she has some good genes, her mother lived to 96, and her two grandmothers both lived to over 100, and the resilience of her people on her side.
"We will cope and we will survive better than a lot of other people, [because] that's just been our way of life".
Matthew Thomas isolating at one end of his parents house cut off from the rest of his family by two plastic sheet dividers.Credit: Justin McManus
Matthew Thomas, 22
Gisborne
Two layers of plastic sheeting separate Matthew, 22, from his parents and sister at their family home in Gisborne.
One week Matthew was working on film sets in Los Angeles, the next week he was back at his home on Melbourne's northern fringe receiving police visits while in mandatory quarantine.
With a bathroom, bedroom and living space to himself and food handed to him from a kitchen window, Matthew's temporary living situation is strange but, for him, it's a lot better than the alternative.
"In the States right now ... it's pretty horrendous the way that COVID-19 is moving over there.
"I don't know if I'm allowed to swear, but it's a shitshow", he says.
"The numbers are scary, and the basic humanitarian and health support systems are just not like what we have back here in Australia.
"I've got a lot of friends over there who have enough money from the government to survive for a month and a half and then what? Can't pay rent, they live in their cars, they have no work."
Kathryn Bordonaro, husband Paul, daughter Taylah and Taylah's boyfriend Fraser have thrown themselves into family gardening while in quarantine after returning from Europe.Credit: Justin McManus
Kathryn Bordonaro, 49
Warragul
"For me my veggie patch is where I always go when I'm being tested," says Warragul mother and businesswoman Kathryn.
Kathryn and husband Paul were whisked away from their dream sabbatical of restoring a chateau garden in late March, as France went into a pandemic-induced lockdown.
Now, the next best thing is her own impressive patch in Warragul, north-east of Melbourne, where the family - including daughter Taylah and boyfriend Fraser who both left dream jobs in London - is spending mandatory quarantine getting their hands dirty.
"I had a friend pass away a year ago and she was young and she shouldn't have died and I came home from her funeral and I was angry with the world and I went to my vegetable garden and I got the pitchfork out," says Ms Bordonaro.
"It's calming, it's soothing. Hands in the earth. There's something about that that I strongly believe centres your soul".
Close friend and neighbour Olivia McLeod making one of her regular visits to chat at Tom's window.Credit: Justin McManus
Tom Davis, 21
Fitzroy
The ski slopes of Whistler in Canada seem a distant memory for Tom Davis, who, like so many others, had his working holiday cut short.
"One week it was all easy going, the next week everyone was just trying to get out of there," he says.
For the past 10 days, Tom has seldom left his bedroom at his parent's Fitzroy home, where he passes the time playing PlayStation and studying.
Tom Davis on his tenth day of isolation after returning from a working holiday in Canada.Credit: Justin McManus
"I've been playing Call of Duty online with friends, you have a headset on and can chat," he says. "All my friends from Whistler are in quarantine too and they have the game".
His best friend Olivia lives next door and has been coming to visit Tom, sharing jokes and passing time speaking between the security bars on his window in his parent's Fitzroy home.
When quarantine is over, Tom will return to work at The Alfred hospital as an orderly, transporting patients around the wards and the new COVID-19 clinic.
"I'm looking forward to helping out there, definitely keen to get back and help instead of sitting around," he says.
"Gotta keep looking forward, keep your head up. It's a tough time for everyone."
Peter Dexter is self-isolating in a truck converted into a tiny house donated by strangers on Facebook.Credit: Rachael Dexter
Peter Dexter, 65
Woodend
The implications of this pandemic are far reaching into everyone's lives - including that of this reporter.
"It's quite comfortable," says my father, Peter, describing the rusty bulk of a truck that has become his coronavirus home-on-wheels.
With a host of auto-immune conditions, including leukaemia, Addison's disease and diabetes, the 65-year-old boilermaker can't take any risks while his wife and daughter (my mum and sister) complete their mandatory quarantine after returning from overseas.
"If I get this virus, it's curtains for me – so I've been relegated to the backyard," he laughs.
My sister is a nurse and will soon return to the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic – carrying a high risk that she might bring the virus back to the family home.
Strangers from a local Facebook group offered up their converted truck – which has a queen-sized bed, a kitchenette, shower and toilet – to Dad, who has parked it at the back of the family property.
"It just goes to prove there are some really nice, decent people out there".
Since Lena's husband Tony died she hosts family for dinner most nights of the week. She is struggling with the loss of family connection and the usual family traditions during the coronavirus pandemic.Credit: Justin McManus
Lena Iaquinto, 86
Pascoe Vale
Usually Lena Iaquinto's Easter weekends are spent with 70 members of her extended family. She makes special pastries and cakes and there's food, drink, laughter, church and children.
But not this year.
"We had a quite a few Easters during the war, but nothing like this one," says the grandmother of nine.
After the death of her husband, Antonio, and now being unable to go to church or see her family, Lena says living through World War II was easier than living through the isolation of the coronavirus.
Lena passes her days watching Mass on an Italian cable TV channel, doing crosswords and emailing her cousins back home in Italy.
She says the devastation she's seeing now in her home country reminds her of the stories her grandmother would tell of the Spanish flu, in which her own sister died.
"She used to tell us it was pretty bad, people were dying a lot – like now, like what I see in Italy now," she says.
Lena tears up and smiles when asked what she looks forward to most on the other side of this crisis.
"A big celebration with all the family," she says. "All together."