‘We thought we were Australian’: Melbourne tower lockdown lives on in legacy of trauma
We don’t realise the value of suburban rhythms, or even see them clearly, until they are ripped away.
There are the children clattering up the hill to school and the queue at the post office – including so many ethnicities, every form of dress. There are the men hanging out in the African cafes and the elderly Chinese in tai chi classes at the foot of the public housing towers.
We don’t see the premise that we are safe and free or the implicit promise that those from war-torn lands who have been accepted as refugees can become Australian. That they belong.
One year ago, at 4pm on a chilly winter afternoon in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne, many of those assumptions collapsed.
The Alfred Street towers, which endured the longest lockdown in July 2020
Nine public housing towers, built as part of the postwar slum clearance and now looming over the gentrified inner suburbs of North Melbourne and Flemington, were placed into a hard lockdown with no warning.
This remains the most severe Covid outbreak response implemented in Australia. Never before, nor since, have restrictions on movement been imposed without warning.
Community leaders, local government and even the Department of Health and Human Services – the mega department that was both landlord to the tenants and lead agency for managing the pandemic – were given no notice. Instead, it was police who swarmed in their hundreds in the wintry dusk, bathing the estates with flashing blue lights as the premier, Daniel Andrews, was on TV announcing the lockdown.
The residents thought there must have been a mass shooting. Then they discovered they were not allowed to leave their flats – not to shop, not to collect children who were on play dates with friends. There were visitors who were not allowed to go home.
The lockdown was spurred by a rising number of Covid cases in the towers, together with an awareness of the risks of the overcrowded living conditions. The state’s pandemic plan did not mention public housing. Everyone was unprepared.
The state ombudsman, Deborah Glass, later found that the lockdown itself was justified on public health grounds, but the sudden implementation without warning was not, and caused fundamental breaches of human rights.
Glass was refused access to the cabinet documents that might have explained the decision for immediate implementation. Public health officials had expected to have 36 hours to prepare. In fact, they had no preparation time. On the basis of other documents, Glass concluded the government had assumed the towers were “a hotbed of criminality and non-compliance and that the people could not be trusted, if warning was given, not to escape the lockdown”.
Instead, Glass wrote, “the evidence was the vast majority were law-abiding
people, just like other Australians”.
The front entrance to the apartment complex at 130 Racecourse Road smeared with a handprint of an unknown substance. It was still there 10 days after this image was made
“It is unimaginable that such stereotypical assumptions, leading to the ‘theatre of policing’ that followed, would have accompanied the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in a luxury apartment block.”
The state government meant to save lives. But as well as the assumptions identified by Glass, there was another that was equally damaging in its own way. It was that public housing tenants were “vulnerable”, that they could not look after their own. That, too, was proved wrong. The people were stronger than they knew.
For years the DHHS had outsourced almost every aspect of the management of the estates, from healthcare to cleaning.
Nor Shanino, raised in the flats, has become one of the community workers who serves as a conduit between government and residents. He remembers a meeting where the managers of the housing estates were forced to reveal they had no idea who was living in the locked-down flats.
“And the state government was effectively saying: what have you been doing for 20 years?”
Nor Shanino grew up in the Flemington Towers. Now a youth worker, he was heavily involved in the effort by local youth groups to organise mental health support and care packages for those forced into lockdown
It was the young people of the community who, after initially facing bureaucratic defensiveness and hostility, ended up moving to the heart of the relief effort, helping organise deliveries of food and using their local knowledge, language and, most important, relationships of trust to mitigate the worst impacts of lockdown.
It was still chaos. The government was suddenly responsible for provisioning a community the size of a town, vertically stacked. For the first few days even the delivery of basic food was imperfect. A week into the lockdown, there were still delays in the delivery of medication. People had asthma attacks without Ventolin, chest pains without blood pressure medication, mental health episodes without their pills. This despite, as Glass described it, many bureaucrats labouring “heroically into the winter nights”.
Ruth Eyakem, born in Ethiopia but resident of Australia for 28 years, had been planning to fill a prescription for anxiety medication. When she tried to leave the building, the police told her to go back. “They said my medicine would be brought to me by the department, that all my needs would be taken care of.”
Eyakem’s medication never arrived. Ruth Eyakem, who lives on the Flemington estate, describes the lockdown as undermining her belief it is possible to be accepted as Australian
She coped by holding a daily traditional African coffee ceremony in the flat with her daughter – roasting the fragrant beans with cardamom and ginger, pouring “with honour and love”, focusing on the moment.
“It helped me calm my nerves. It was my medicine.” She now has a business offering a coffee ceremony for events. She says she will never recover from the lockdown, but she has learned “we are strong, we move forward”.
‘We were treated differently’
One year on, the lockdown lives on in a legacy of trauma, but also in that realisation of strength.
Most profound, though, is an altered relationship between citizens and government – an adjusted set of assumptions on both sides.
Some things have got better. Among the departmental officers and agencies who were on the front line, there is a tacit admission that nothing like it should ever happen again. One departmental employee, who asked not to be named as she was not authorised to speak, said she was still recovering.
“In February I watched television showing the Chinese police nailing up apartment doors in Wuhan and welding people into their buildings to stop the spread of corona. I thought we would never do anything like that here. Then a few months later, I was part of doing pretty much exactly the same. It made me question everything I had given my life to.”
Now she is determined to be part of a better future.
Ahmed Dini, who works with Shanino, says there is a lot of goodwill and “excellent people have been appointed to important positions” in the new Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, established when the DHHS was split after the hotel quarantine inquiry criticised its competence and toxic culture.
Dini says the lockdown put systemic problems in the spotlight, and there is a refreshed willingness from government to fix them. “But there are still a lot of things we are working through, and government is slow.”
Ahmed Dini, a resident of the Canning Street complex, has been vocal in his assertion the lockdown was handled poorly and has adversely affected AfroAustralian youth
Barry Berih, born in Australia to Eritrean parents, was in the North Melbourne flat he shares with his brother and mother when he saw Andrews announce the lockdown.
“I was shocked, and then I thought we had to do something.”
He and his brother were later diagnosed with Covid, fortunately with only mild symptoms. They were left trying to isolate from their mother in a twobedroom flat with only one bathroom. “Basically it was a nightmare,” he says.
Nevertheless, using his phone and social media accounts, he helped to organise the community response from his bedroom.
The biggest assault was to his sense of citizenship. “For those of us born here, we work in government, in private industry. We contribute to Australia. We thought we were Australian. And more than that, we are human. And suddenly we were treated differently. It makes you question everything. It was an enormous shock.”
Barry Berih, who contracted Covid at 33 Alfred Street, North Melbourne, became a key figure in organising the community to help its own
After five days and a massive coronavirus testing effort, the lockdown was lifted at eight of the nine towers. In Berih’s home block at 33 Alfred Street, North Melbourne, 11% of residents were found to be Covid-positive and it was locked down for another nine days.
‘You might call it systemic racism’ The public housing community is diverse. The population of the estates is younger than Melbourne as a whole.
Other than English, the most common languages are Somali and Arabic, followed by Vietnamese – the legacy of a previous wave of refugees, now among the eldest people in the flats. Other languages include Oromo, Chinese, Amharic and Tigrinya. There are also Anglo and Indigenous Australians, many with disabilities.
There is no tenant representative body – despite the ombudsman recommending one should be established. Setting up such a body in such a diverse community is not simple.
During the pandemic the community spaces at the foot of the towers have been locked, making it even harder for the community to gather and organise.
There are divisions across ethnicities, and also between age groups. Awatif Taha, who arrived as a refugee from Sudan 20 years ago, says that during lockdown there were conflicts within families.
Awatif Taha has lived on the Flemington estate for 18 years. With her husband, Elhadi Abass, she has been involved in trying to improve relations between the government and residents. A Koran in the home of Awatif Taha
“Our children, the educated ones, they are yelling and angry and talking about their rights, and the older family members say ‘Don’t do that. That may be a dreadful mistake. Don’t make trouble.’ The older ones thought Australia was different from where they came from, but now they were thinking they had been wrong, and this government too would persecute us.”
Taha and her husband, Elhadi Abass, work for the Multicultural Sudanese Centre. Government communications have greatly improved, they say. There is a department-run WhatsApp group distributing information. During Melbourne’s recent outbreak – which included cases at the North Melbourne primary school attended by many children from the flats – there were Zoom conferences for residents addressed by health authorities, including the commander responsible for testing, Jeroen Weimar, and the emergency management commissioner, Andrew Crisp.
Elhadi Abass has lived on the Flemington estate for 18 years
Rose Iser, the local government councillor for the ward that covers the Flemington estate, was on one of those conferences. She acknowledges the genuineness of the communications effort, and the improvement it represents, but surveying the screens she concluded that the relationship between state and citizens that played out during the lockdown was still entrenched.
“All the people on that call from governments were white, middle class. The message was we want to hear your voice, but the imbalance is still so ingrained. There was no power or self-determination or any real voice in the management of the estate given to the residents. Things have shifted, but it still hasn’t seemed to crack open this major systemic – you might call it oppression. You might call it systemic racism.”
The residents were assured at the meeting that there was now a proper outbreak plan for the flats. They asked for it, but were not given a copy.
Other things have improved. Newly aware of the living conditions of their tenants, the state government has helped some large families crammed into tiny flats to move to private rental housing further out of town.
In line with the ombudsman’s recommendations, there have been changes to public health laws to allow for decisions to detain people to be reviewed.
The state budget, released in May, included funding for a “paving the way forward” program, described as a pilot of “a new way of working with residents … where residents are involved in the decisions that impact them”. Six community members will be employed under the program. Separately, “health concierges” from the community have been employed to sit at the foot of each tower, to help with Covid safety measures, Covid testing and distributing public health messages.
‘It no longer feels like home’
But undermining all the work to improve relationships is the failure of the government to officially admit fault.
The ombudsman recommended the government should apologise to the residents – not for the lockdown, but for the implementation, and the breaches of human rights.
Within hours of the report being released, the housing minister, Richard Wynne, vigorously rejected that idea.
“We make no apology for saving lives,” he said, asserting that if the same situation had occurred in a private high-rise, the response would have been the same.
The government’s lack of an apology was mentioned by all the residents interviewed for this article.
Melissa Whelan lived on the Flemington estate with her son, who has autism, as well as caring for her grandmother, who lived in a neighbouring block. She found she was unable to visit her grandmother to cook her meals. She spent hours on the phone trying to alert the authorities to her grandmother’s need for basic care.
“It was pretty terrifying,” she says. Twelve months later, she has moved in with a friend in a nearby lowrise public housing estate, although she still pays rent on her old apartment.
Melissa Whelan lived in the Flemington estate but has moved, with her autistic son, to a friend’s apartment on a low-rise public housing estate in a nearby suburb because she gets panic attacks when she returns to her home
“I can’t live there any more,” she says. “I get panic attacks every time I go into the foyer … it no longer feels like home.”
The lack of an apology is key, she says. “If you are not going to say sorry, what sort of guarantee is there that you are not going to do it to us again?”
The lack of trust affects everything in the pandemic response. Information from the authorities on vaccination competes with misinformation distributed through social media, which is relied on by residents with poor English.
Taha has spoken to neighbours who believe the government wants to kill refugees, and that those who accept vaccination will die within a couple of years.
In a written response to questions, Wynne acknowledged the “significant sacrifices” made by residents, but did not address the issue of an apology.
He said vaccination teams were in place at the housing towers, but uptake “hasn’t been as strong as we hoped”.
Since the lockdown in 2020, government advice posters have been placed throughout the towers
On Wednesday the government released its formal response to the ombudsman’s report, saying another new program had been developed to support “sensitive residential locations” where the risk of Covid transmission was higher. This included the state’s 57 high-rise public housing towers. The program was “premised on genuine community engagement”.
The government was “listening and acting to resident feedback on the ground”, the document said.
Glass said it was “disappointing” the government had not apologised for the suddenness of the lockdown.
“The government has made some efforts to prevent this happening again, which is encouraging,” she said. “But the lack of an apology misses a vital opportunity to acknowledge the harm caused to many people, and to confirm that their rights matter as much as those of other Victorians in this pandemic.”
And that is something the residents are far from sure about.
In the middle of the recent Melbourne outbreak a temporary fence was put up around the main park on the Flemington estate. It had been planned for months as part of a refurbishment. But the timing could not have been worse. It revived memories of the lockdown at Alfred Street, when in a desperate attempt to organise fresh air and exercise, a fence was put up around the entrance to the tower.
Berih remembers: “I looked at it, and I saw this cage. And I thought, well, that is it. They have put us in prison.”
The fence was demolished quickly after protests, but it was, as the ombudsman put it, “degrading and inhumane”. Seeing a new fence go up, some residents thought they were about to be caged. Such is the state of trust.
The Flemington Housing Community towers are seen at night from Barry Berih’s floor of the Alfred Street tower
This goes to the heart of how government works. To governments, a cleaning contract is one kind of issue, a fenced construction project another and a vaccine program another again – each function outsourced. But in the lived experience of the housing estates, they are all part of one problem that might be loosely summed up as a lack of trust and a lack of power.
The rhythms of the suburb are back. Most of the residents just want to get on with their lives.
Taha and Eyakem remember when the Flemington estate was released from lockdown at midnight. They went down in the dark and danced and wept and shouted and sang.
When daylight came, they found on the grass messages and flowers left by the broader Flemington community.
“We are with you”, “We see you” and “We’re sorry”.
“It was wonderful,” says Taha. She sees in it an assurance that, despite it all, they belong.
For years the DHHS had outsourced almost every aspect of the management of the estates, from healthcare to cleaning