Understanding the great Oz bogroll freak-out, with David Penberthy

A MATE of mine was at his local Bunnings this week buying some handyman stuff for a job he was working on.

There was a chap in the queue in front of him who had loaded his trolley entirely with gas masks. It was literally overflowing with the things. My mate pegged off a sneaky shot of him on his iPhone – it’s 2020, that’s what you do – and had a squizz over his shoulder as he paid.

They cost him $4100.

You could assume the fellow intended to sell them back home in China for a profit. Either that or he is especially safety conscious and has several hundred children, even though there is no scientific evidence that these masks will make a sniff of difference when coronavirus comes knocking.

Masks you can understand, but the great toilet paper panic of 2020 is easily one of the weirdest things Australia has ever witnessed.

How did our normally sane nation lose its collective mind over the need to stockpile dunny paper?

The great toilet paper buyup appears to have happened in two phases. The first was baseless panic when a handful of people started emptying the shelves at Costco and buying those big bundles of bogroll from the major supermarket chains. By the middle of this week, it had entered phase two, a strange act of mass mimicry, fuelled by the sense that if everyone else was buying the toilet paper, maybe we should buy some too. We became a nation of wildebeest, our herd galloping along as per usual, when suddenly a few changed direction and the rest of us changed with them.

It’s a full-blown act of national psychosis, which reached its zenith on Wednesday afternoon with NSW police being called to cordon off the toilet roll aisle at a Sydney supermarket amid reports a woman had allegedly armed herself with a knife to get her hands on some three-ply.

It is worth considering the manner in which Australians have been responding to this perceived threat versus the manner in which it’s unfolded in China.

An old university mate of mine called Simon has been living for the past few years in Wuhan, where he teaches at a university. He and his Chinese-born wife and daughter have spent much of the past five weeks cooped up in their 20th floor apartment. There have been times when they have been allowed out to visit the supermarket to stock up on essentials, and he tells me the process has been orderly and calm. My mate says the entire experience in Wuhan has been a collectivist one, as befits this vast communist nation.

Compare that with the great Aussie toilet paper freak-out, and it’s been all rugged individualism here, every man and woman for themselves, as we trip over each other to grab the one thing we clearly don’t need in such ludicrously vast quantities in the event of being quarantined.

“I ain’t coming back to Australia,” Simon told me in his latest email from Wuhan.

“Too damn dangerous. And what’s worse, I won’t be able to keep my backside clean.”

All I know is, I’ve got 27 toilet rolls, and if the authorities come for them, they can pry them from my cold, dead hands.