Welcome to Australia - Hotel Quarantine Style
As I edit this blog post that has been drafted over the last month, Australia has just delivered a serious blow to Australians abroad and Australians with loved ones abroad - the arrival caps have been HALVED to a measly 3,025 people per week. I am beyond disappointed with both the Federal and State Governments of Australia that no other solution could be found for the #strandedaussie situation. Reading the #strandedaussie Facebook pages is absolutely heartbreaking. Stories of people diagnosed with stage 3 cancer that fear they’ll never see their children again, people seriously contemplating arriving by boat as ‘Australian citizen asylum seekers’, and people just absolutely distraught and stressed about what will happen to their upcoming flights. We are the ONLY country in the world that has done this to our citizens and I fear the ramifications for this country that is becoming more divided and xenophobic by the day. I am feeling even more appreciative (and somewhat guilty) of the fact that my family have recently made it home, just in time before these draconian rules are put in place for at least six months. I understand first hand just how difficult it is, and we’ve had it easy compared to most. Here is our story of getting home - part reflection, part diary.
Whilst this is not 100% true, Australian citizens are ‘allowed’ home, the hurdles can be so great for some that they may as well have been banned from the country, whilst others flit in and out easily
Moving overseas with a family of six, you KNOW it’s going to be challenging on the way over – for us it was an eight-month process of change before we even arrived into Memphis, let alone the 20 months it took for all of us to be settled. You also know it’s going to be just as challenging on the way back, if not more – because that’s what we’d been told by those that had already done it. Throw in a world-wide pandemic and a sudden death-in-the-family, and well, things just got a tad trickier. But what’s better for you than a good ole’ challenge hey, “we can do this” we said to ourselves….and here we are back on Australian soil, welcomed with open arms…well, ok, not quite that bit…but home at least READY to be welcomed with open arms from our loved ones. You see, in order to ‘keep Australia safe’, the government decided to shut its borders at the beginning of the pandemic to everyone except citizens and permanent residents (oh, and Hollywood super-stars and international sports people who can get in ahead of the first group), and it’s been a hugely successful strategy in (mostly) keeping out COVID. But it also means there are extreme caps on how many Australians (and those with business exemptions) are allowed into the country at any one time, which has led to an enormous bottle-neck of Aussies still stuck overseas, many who have now just given up on trying to get home. You can read more about the whole issue in the blog post I wrote in March #strandedaussies. So as I write this post from hotel quarantine (edit - it was mostly written in HQ with some additions added July 2), I realise how very lucky we have been just to make it back to Australia – the country we were all born in. This is just a summary of OUR family’s experience in the process of getting home, hotel quarantine, traversing state-borders and all the emotions that go along with it. It’s been one heck of a ride!
The Decision to Come Home
How does one decide when a good time to come home is? It’s complicated. I won’t bore you with all the details, but for various different reasons throughout our stay in the US, our home date was a moving beast. My husband had a 3-year work contract, with the possibility of extending. COVID hit in March 2020 – and visiting home became impossible (and we decided to stay in the US and shelter in place which expats were told to do by the Australian Government if they could). After the sudden passing of my step-father in January 2021, again, visiting home was impossible. Australia started to feel like another world away, and what was once a 24-36hr process to get home became more like 3 to 4 months, if you could even afford it – and there is no queue, despite what many in Australia seem to think. The decision became pretty clear – we needed to get home as soon as we could.
With flights not available until April, we decided to try our luck for May, when our eldest child would complete Junior High in the US, and when my husband could reasonably finish his work contract. Interestingly, the covid-fear-factor never played a part in the decision-making process. Yes, the US had a disastrous 2020 and many lives were lost unneccesarily, but with a new President and a superb vaccine rollout came confidence. Many of our friends & acquaintances also had COVID – possibly 1 in 3 or 4, and for all of them, they were either asymptomatic and were only tested in order to travel somewhere or because they were a close contact of someone (in the US a close contact according to the CDC was any individual within 6 feet of an infected person for a total of 15 minutes or more - but this may change with the Delta variant of course). Of those that were sick, they described it as a cold or a mild flu, which only lasted 48 hrs at the most. This is not to diminish the severity of COVID in others - it can have absolutely devastating affects in some, but my point is, when you are surrounded by a virus that mostly causes mild symptoms in those you know, the personal fear-factor is greatly reduced. On top of that, we know the cultural difference between the US and Australia in terms of personal/collective responsibility is quite different, so whilst we still followed all of the rules in the US, they were in no way as extreme as the rules in Australia (or Victoria at least)- which of course is why Australia saw only 900 or so deaths, and the US now over 600,000. It helped that all of our elderly parents were safely tucked up in Australia, and we only had ourselves to worry about.
It also meant that, despite not being fearful of the virus once we knew more about it, we had also seen the devastation it had caused so were quick to sign up for the vaccines. There wasn’t much vaccine hesitancy in the people we knew in the US, and there was no media scare-mongering over the vaccines that I witnessed.
A packed Las Vegas Memorial Day long weekend (May 29). Most COVID restrictions were lifted by then.
Whilst the US is now completely opening up over their summer, and it’s an exciting time to be there; and our hometown of Melbourne recently went in another lockdown – with more expected in the future due to the COVID suppression strategy (update July 2, currently there are now 12 million Australians in all but 2 states in lockdown due to around 34 COVID cases), it’s easy to question if we have made the right decision coming home. All six of us were settled in our various ways, five out of six fully vaccinated (1 too young), and there is so much more to explore of the magnificent US. But at the end of the day, family is the most important thing right, and it’s time to give my Mum a big old hug.
In San Francisco, we were able to purchase tickets to the ‘vaccinated’ section of the Giants baseball game
The Travel
My greatest appreciation throughout the logistical tightrope of getting home in the COVID era, has been for the company my husband works for. Their support of our situation has been enormous - they look after their staff and their families they’ve sent abroad. Thank goodness we weren’t relying on the Australian government for any assistance. Despite what you might have heard in the past from our media (more so throughout 2020), the support for #strandedaussies has been minimal, in fact, the issue has become a political football with both sides using the issue to score cheap shots against each other. No party has made any significant inroads into finding a solution. But with 70-80% of Australians wanting the borders kept closed, why should they try and help? Closed borders is a vote-winning-strategy, that historically has been used on refugees, but is now being used on Australian citizens. Nothing will change on this front whilst there are upcoming elections to be won. Just be careful if you ever leave this country in the future….a word of warning.
The hoops to jump through to get back to Australia felt a bit like this scene from the film ‘Entrapment’
I booked our flights back in January, initially LA to Melbourne, but I then realised this flight route was no longer running. I discovered that the airlines were taking their cues from the Australian government about when quarantine caps might increase, and would place tickets on sale accordingly. But as we know, it was more likely the arrival caps were reduced – every time there was a leak from hotel quarantine. So, we had booked ‘ghost flights’ that were never even going to go ahead – as thousands upon thousands of Australians have unknowingly done, and then they’re left with credits for airlines they’ll probably never fly with. We were lucky that I discovered this accidently through a Facebook page, then promptly changed our flight to fly into Sydney – a route that had never stopped and was still currently flying. And that’s all before we even talk about the inflated cost of airline tickets up to 4 or 5 times what they would usually be…. (edit July 2 - now caps have been halved, we’ll see even more expensive flight tickets, more flight routes being dropped and more airlines stopping flying to Australia. The ramifications will be felt throughout the country in so many different ways.)
I will admit, my anxiety over the last couple of months reached peak level a number of times. There were just so many hoops to jump through. You have to scale everything back and do one-thing-at-a-time. It is a massive task packing up a whole family in one country and moving it to another, especially when you’re dealing with teenage emotions! There were many, many tears in the lead up to leaving Memphis, from every single one of us – some relating to stress, some relating to sadness of loss back in Australia, some related to saying goodbye to friends, and some just for when you see your kids cry. Watching my 9 year old boy breaking down crying after saying goodbye to his best friend was enough to set my waterworks flowing. And saying goodbye to our best family friends – our quasi-cousins and ‘Quaranteam’ was heartbreaking. But I think my biggest breakdown came the week before our flight when I was trying to find somewhere in San Francisco to get our pre-flight PCR COVID tests done. Over a period of three days I spent 4 or 5 hours researching where to get tested, but there were no appointments available. At that point, I thought we would never get home and I panicked. The six months of bottled-up emotions came pouring out of me and I was a bubbling, snorting, middle-aged mess!
Well, of course we found somewhere for the testing that was within all of the rules the Australian government set, and all results came back negative, or I wouldn’t be here writing this. What a relief!!!
Whilst the domestic airports in the US are bustling, the international ones are very quiet. We were the only ones checking in for our flight, and most of the airport shops were closed. At one point, a policeman flew past me on one of the those mono-motorized bikes. My eyes glanced towards him, then to a closed-up electronics store, and it felt like a scene out of a dystopian film set in the future – a new world order was taking charge whilst the old one was being destroyed….
United Airlines International check in desk
Excitement to see our plane
Our flight consisted of the 6 of us, 14 other passengers, and 12 crew! Due to the quarantine caps, flights have been coming into Australia with a similar number of passengers for over a year now; and only 15 out of 54 airlines are currently even flying into the country. Some of the airlines have cargo contracts with Australia thankfully, so they only book to the caps and rarely bump passengers. Jill, our flight attendant, told me there was most likely vaccines on our flight – good news I thought (edit July 2 - but with more reduced commercial flights, will it be even harder for the vaccines to get to Australia?) There were a couple of American businessmen on our flight in astonishment at the two weeks of quarantine they had to do, a young Aussie male who had been waiting over a year to get home, a young couple with large musical instruments - not sure if they were Australians or with a foreign band (many of which have also been allowed entry in to Australia), a Canadian, a Japanese, and the rest I’m not sure of. I was trying to be a super-sleuth and determine how many ‘stranded’ Aussies were in fact on the plane, but it was difficult with the social distancing that is adhered to. ‘Not many’ was my rough conclusion.
20 passengers, 12 crew and freight on our flight! Almost every flight arriving into Australia looks like this. 15 of 54 airlines only now flying to Australia. It’s hard to imagine this changing for a long time with Australia’s current policies.
After landing, it was a long process of queues and questions. They keep the plane load completely together, then after processing, they split up the singles/couples who go onto one bus, the families on another bus. We were actually excited by this because we assumed it meant we were probably going to get apartment style accommodation rather than hotels – another reason to fly into Sydney over Melbourne. From all accounts on all of the Facebook pages, Sydney was one of the best places for families.
At each check point at the airport and the hotel, we were greeted with an array of friendly nurses, police, and army. It wasn’t the mean, authoritative personnel some people had written about. But you are herded from place to place, and not offered either a toilet break or a drink of water along the way. So as flight attendant Jill had warned me, you do feel a bit like livestock, and any request for a toilet break is greeted with a quick ‘no’. You’re also told nothing about the process, just handed a sheet of paper with brief information. We didn’t know where we were staying until the bus pulled up in front of the hotel. It was 3 hours from when we landed to when we arrived at the hotel. From what I’ve read, this was pretty good - I’ve read of a 6-7hr transfer up on the Gold Coast where elderly and children were refused toilet breaks. We were the only people on our bus, but if I was sharing it with tens of others, possibly with COVID, I’m sure there would have been a greater chance of catching COVID on that bus with no opening windows, than what I would have encountered in the past 15 months of social distancing in the US.
(Edit July 2 - many Australian’s coming in are now vaccinated so are a much lower risk to others than those within Australia with COVID that are trusted to isolate at home. Also worth noting is that the recent Delta strain variants have been brought in by air crew and freight crew - not returned travelers).
Your first day is DAY ZERO. It’s the nights that are counted. We arrived on a Wednesday morning, so after 14 nights, we get to leave in the 4am – 10am time slot. Bring it on!!!
Here’s some highlights and lowlights:
Day 0 – Wednesday
As I was checking in to the accommodation, the rest of the family were taken up to our room – in two separate trips, as only 4 are allowed in the lift at one time, even though we were the same family. When I was escorted up by the friendly army chap, I was greeted with squeals of delight from the kids. I’ve read some horror quarantine stories, and thought it was better to prepare the family for the worst, and hope for the best. It seems ridiculous that as an Australian citizen that just wants to come home to their country, you have to hope and pray that you’re put into accommodation that has FRESH AIR!! We are very lucky – we have a 3 bedroom apartment with a balcony, lounge room, kitchen, laundry and 2 bathrooms. Finally, some dividends for being a big family! The excitement was short-lived though when we discovered the wi-fi was extremely poor. We were also very hungry. You’re told your food arrives between a certain time, but we were waiting, waiting, waiting…..and finally some lunch came at 2.30pm – some sandwiches, about 10hrs after we had eaten something on the plane. Again, dinner came later than the time allocation, and despite everyone trying to hold out for this, I was the only one still awake at 7.30pm when I discovered it at our door. Now, none of this was going to kill us (despite the kids saying they were going to die from hunger numerous times throughout the day), but the lack of control around any part of the process is something we would have to get used to quickly.
The most exciting part of the day was when there was a knock at the door - which usually meant a meal delivery. We didn’t have a menu in advance like some hotels do, so it was a mystery box every time. The mood for the rest of the day could almost be determined by that knock!
Day 1 – Thursday
Breakfast gets delivered the day before, between 3 – 5pm. It usually consists of some cereal packets, milk, fruit, perhaps some yoghurt for the kids, maybe a couple of croissants or danishes, and some tea bags and international roast coffee sachets. Some days there is even an egg roll or something similar. It’s totally fine, but I can’t help but think how much less wastage there would be if there was any choice whatsoever in the ordering, or since we’re in an apartment, why we couldn’t just be given a loaf of bread, a tub of butter, some vegemite and large boxed cereal, and perhaps some eggs. The food AND packaging wastage would be so much less. We’re able to do online ordering, so just being able to make yourself a piece of vegemite toast when you want, makes a world of difference.
A sample of a kids breakfast, which usually came with some fruit, a drink and maybe some cereal
This breakfast was tasty. It came quite a few time in our 2 weeks.
The most exciting thing about Day 1 was the delivery of Haighs treats from my sister. She lives in Broome – on the other side of the country, but she was in Sydney for a conference. It was frustrating of course that I couldn’t see her, it has been nearly 2 years since we’ve had a hug, but it was a comfort knowing she was so close.
The excitement was again short-lived when the internet booster she had also purchased for us didn’t seem to make any difference to our hopeless wi-fi. Whilst we’d been able to manage a Woolies order on day 1, the wi-fi seemed even worse now and we couldn’t even talk on the phone to our loved ones – you see, there is no chance to get a new Australian phone number because you’re taken directly to quarantine, and the free SIM cards at the airport were no good to me without wi-fi because I couldn’t register them! Oh the joys….
I will add here, the hotel were doing everything they could to help us.
Day 2 – Friday
The internet will not work The internet will not work The internet will not work The internet will not work
The internet will not work The internet will not work The internet will not work The internet will not work
OK, deep breaths, I’ll give the apartment a good clean, kids make a mess!
I’m not allowed a vacuum cleaner.
There are no available mops.
I have to provide my own cleaning products!
Argh! How can the government force you into two weeks of hotel quarantine, and then not even provide you with products to clean with !!!!!!!!! Not happy Jan.
And this lunch tasted awful.
I have some leftover wipes – that will do for cleaning.
I have a broom, I’ll just sweep up the crumbs from the black carpet. It takes a while, but it’s not like I have any plans, and it makes life seem so much better again.
The hotel have provided us with a new router. Wi-fi works again! It’s still not great, but it’s much better.
We get sent a care package with all the Aussie favourites – Milo, BBQ shapes, Snakes…. you get the drift.
Life is ok again.
Had to resort to cleaning the floor with wipes down on my hands and knees
Somewhere in there we had COVID tests as well. It’s all very quick and professional, and the nurses – mostly from Ireland and the UK, are lovely. We also get a call from a nurse every morning. They ask if we have any COVID symptoms, but also how our mental health is.
We had 4 COVID tests in 16 days - 1 before our flight within 72 hrs of flying at a cost of around US $1,000, 3 in quarantine (included as part of the $6,000 quarantine cost of six people), then we’re expected to get another at Day 16 once we’re out.
This crane was one of our views, and it felt like a metaphor for every time we had a long stick poked down our throat and up our noses.
Day 3 – Saturday
It’s a strange day, moods are all over the place. Boredom sets in.
I find solace in David Stratton’s ‘Cinema Stories of Australia’ which makes me feel like I’m home.
Hotel quarantine already feels like an eternity.
We need to keep busy with games, baseball, golf, tv, just dance, eating, yoga etc.
Despite the 9 yr old needing quite a lot of adult time, I’m glad we’re doing this with older kids, and my heart goes out to those with toddlers in quarantine.
I think about those with mental health issues who are doing this on their own. It must be a struggle.
We chat to the neighbours above who have flown in from London. It feels good to know you’re not here alone.
Ironic that 3 of us ended up in jail at the same time in our Monopoly game
Day 4 – Sunday
Everything feels better today.
There seems to be a collective sense of ‘giving in’ to the process and just accepting what is. You cannot control it, so you might as well try and enjoy it.
The family are happy when the Kangaroos AFL team are kicking goals – and the screaming of excitement was a welcome release of energy for all.
Phone calls to family friends were made, and we started to feel excitement for seeing everyone.
I managed to sneak in a film – Nomadland, and was transported back to rural US where we had recently traveled to. This was a stunning reflection on the beauty of our travel in the US.
A welcome treat for all
Day 5 – Day 13
Every day kind of blurs into the next at this point.
You try to find some kind of routine. For me, seeing sun rise and sun set each day helped. I was still waking very early from jetlag, and I appreciated the quiet hours of solace waiting to see the first peak of warmth behind the grey buildings.
We could just see the Sydney Harbour Bridge from our apartment
We also had a view of the Anzac Bridge and a glimpse of Darling Harbour
Card games were an important part of each day. In this moment, I was enjoying a beer on the balcony watching the sun set over the city, and was thankful my children were playing happily and not fighting!
I try to get a few jobs done, like organising an appointment for the uniform shop at the the girls new school. But everything feels hard, and I realise how mentally exhausting it is to undertake hotel quarantine – kids or no kids.
Little things like friends delivering flowers and magazines, or Australian food, make the world of difference.
Mum and Beccy organized these beautiful flowers
Day 10 – this needs its own post, it was probably my hardest day
We need to work out our exit plan. The original intention was to travel straight to Melbourne to see family, drop off most of our luggage, and pick up some winter clothes which we’d sent via air freight (the remainder of our goods come on a shipping container in a couple of months); then we were going to visit my family in South Australia. But with the SA borders closed to Victoria, we decided we would have to go straight to SA. Then NSW has an outbreak….and the SA government closed the border to anyone who had visited a hot spot in Sydney. We hadn’t been in a hot spot, but I wondered, what if they close the border to those from Greater Sydney? I had heard through the quarantine Facebook page that when this had happened to people in the past, if they went straight from quarantine to the airport, in a private vehicle, fully masked, with the process taking less than 6 hours, and they could provide all of their documentation to back this up, then they should be ok to fly to the other state. But then I’d also heard of others who had been unlucky to have to do two stints of quarantine just because they had been in a lockdown city after their quarantine for more than 6 hours before their onward flight. This had me worried – there was no possible way our family would mentally be able to do another stint in hotel quarantine. So I spent half the day scouring the SA Health website, talking to the SA Police, talking with the NSW Police at our hotel – but not one of these people, or the website, could determine the correct procedure to avoid further quarantine – I guess because it’s different in every state and constantly changing. Finally, I was able to talk with someone who was involved in the quarantine process in NSW, and she backed up what I had previously read on the Facebook page. The process of getting back to Australia is hard enough, let alone then having to deal with state border closures! I know Australians have had to deal with this for 15 months now and I empathise with you all.
These superb flowers from my girlfriend Viv brightened my day and made the apartment feel livable again
Day 13 - Tuesday
We’re visited by the NSW Police to tell us we’re getting released tomorrow, yippee! There’s lots of rules and regulations around when and how you can leave, but we can leave, and that’s all we really care about at this stage.
Day 14 - RELEASE DAY
On the morning of departure, the border from NSW to SA isn’t closed, but we take all of the precautions we’d been advised of so as not to have to do quarantine again, just in case. As we were mid-air, the border closed!! Again, I was thrown into a ‘racing-heart, sweaty, anxious’ middle-aged woman. I was praying pretty hard in the long wait to be interviewed by the police and ‘COVID staff’, “please let us in, please let us in, please let us in”. We had a Channel 9 interviewer tell us we’d probably have to go into quarantine, then we also had a policewoman tell us we might have to quarantine again - as she was on the phone checking with her superior.
Thank GOD we didn’t have to in the end. After being interviewed by the same Channel 9 interviewer, finally we got to walk out of the Adelaide Airport to freedom, into Mum’s arms, then onto the beach.
What a great feeling. Finally, we had made it. It had taken us six months, but for many, it’s taken over a year, with multiple cancelled flights and raided bank accounts - if they’ve been lucky enough to even get home.
Post Quarantine
As I read back on this post, I wonder if I sound ungrateful, and perhaps a bit whingy. But at the time of the diary entries, it felt cathartic to get my frustrations down in writing – it helped me to deal with them. It’s one of those experiences that are quite difficult in the moment, but that you can look back on and appreciate it for what it was. Hotel quarantine, and the process of getting home, has certainly been an experience to remember. Not one that I ever wish to repeat again, but I think we’re definitely the lucky ones, and I appreciate even more so, many aspects of my life on a much greater level. Just the fact that we’ve even had to go through this process means that we’ve been lucky enough to travel abroad. And whilst quarantine isn’t anything like prison or forced detention, it gives you the tiniest glimpse into what it might feel like for those that are detained. Anything that helps you gain empathy for others is a gift in my eyes.
In many ways, quarantine has been like a decompression chamber. We’ve had time to get over our jet-lag, and to also prepare ourselves mentally for a completely different COVID philosophy in Australia. Despite the frustrating moments, we’ve actually had quite a bit of family fun in here. It’s also an intense mental challenge that surely will only be helpful with future challenges – and something I think I could put on my resume!
I didn’t have too many reservations about doing hotel quarantine. We knew it was coming and could prepare for it, and we know how much it has helped keep Australia relatively COVID free. But should it continue? Well yes, but differently, otherwise Australians will be stranded forever and no tourist will ever come to visit. It’s also very hard on mental health for many. The first study to assess the mental health of those in Sydney hotel quarantines recently came out. It’s by the Medical Journal of Australia, titled Emergency department presentations by residents of Sydney quarantine hotels during the COVID-19 outbreak https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2021/214/10/emergency-department-presentations-residents-sydney-quarantine-hotels-during
It states that from June – Sept 2020, there were 2774 people registered for special health hotels in Sydney, of whom 461 (16.6%) presented at least once to the RPA Emergency Department.
- 13 people (2.8%) presented for COVID, with none requiring intensive care
- 102 people (19%) presented for mental health problems
- And 84 people (15%) presented for cardiovascular problems
Of the 102 presenting for mental health:
- 43 were for anxiety
- 24 were for suicidal ideation
- And were for 11 for acute psychosis
What I’d like to see now is a more common sense risk-based approach to how we do quarantine – that sees us using a combination of monitored home quarantine for those vaccinated and/or from low-risk countries, the hotel quarantine system used for those that are vaccinated but can’t quarantine at home, and dedicated quarantine facilities for those that are a higher-risk. This approach has also been backed up by infectious diseases physician Professor Greg Dore https://theconversation.com/home-quarantine-for-vaccinated-returned-travellers-is-extremely-low-risk-and-wont-damage-their-mental-health-162436
(Edit July 2 - as part of the ‘National Cabinet 4-step-plan’ as announced today, they will be trialing home quarantine for international arrivals (note, it’s already happening anyway in much of Australia whenever those diagnosed with COVD or close contacts are trusted to quarantine at home). When this will start, no-one knows. I just hope it’s not another announcement of a plan that never actually happens…)
It would also be helpful if the government started asking arrivals if they were vaccinated. At the moment they’re not. This is a major missed opportunity that could help in our own vaccine rollout.
It’s been a tough day for #strandedaussies. For many, what hope they had connecting with loved ones has all but gone after today’s announcement. The government say they’ll put on more repatriation flights, but only recently said the NT government can’t cope with more arrivals. So I’ll believe that when I see it.
I’m extremely thankful that I’m home so that I can visit loved ones, but I’ve come back to an Australia I hardly recognise. It no longer feels like the carefree, ‘she’ll be right’ country that values mateship; but one that seems a bit smug and arrogant - “we’re the envy of the world”, “there is no place people would rather be”, a bit entitled, and one that leaves its citizens stranded overseas who somehow in all of this, have been made out to be the enemy, much like any other ‘outsider’ if you look back on our history. The lack of empathy from so many (not in my personal circle that I know of I might add) is really sad, and very telling. The country feels more insular than ever, enveloped with fear, and more xenophobic than I can remember. But maybe is has always been like this, and I just didn’t see it, living in my own privileged comfort-zone bubble; and COVID has just brought it to the forefront. Or perhaps I lived in the US for too long where freedom is seen as a basic human right. I love Australia, and it’s awful to see it like this, but I experienced a more hopeful US in 2021 with the wonderful vaccine rollout and a different leadership style. Life was getting back to normal in the US when we left, and much of the fighting and division of 2020 subsided. Whilst Australia certainly isn’t at the same intense levels of the US craziness in 2020, I’ve seen many similarities here, so it gives me hope that in six months time, we too might be in a much more positive position where life might start getting back to normal.
Until then, I’m just grateful I’m still here on this amazing earth, having the privilege to witness a once-in-a-lifetime event; and being able to share it with some amazing friends and family.
Henley Beach, South Australia - there is always light and rainbows amidst the dark unsettled times