Lockdown in Melbourne... again
ANNAHAYESTELLS
FORMER PEOPLE NEWSPAPERS JOURNALIST US ABOUT THE SITUATION IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA WHERE A COVID-19 SPIKE HAS SEEN A SECOND PERIOD OF LOCKDOWN WITH FOREIGN WORKERS LEFT UNCERTAIN AS TO WHEN THEY’LL GET TO VISIT HOME AGAIN
THERE’S A strange, despondent feeling around Melbourne at the moment as the city faces into another six weeks of lockdown.
Well, I say the city but really I mean among my friends, work colleagues, people you meet while queuing for a takeaway coffee or walking their dog in the park. I haven’t been in the actual CBD in months.
When it became clear that Covid-19 was in Australia – unsurprising given the sheer amount of travel in and out of the country – there were shutdowns all over the place. Formula 1 – gone; Melbourne Comedy Festival – axed; the AFL season postponed and, eventually, restaurants and bars shuttered for everything but takeaway.
It was a strange feeling, to see a city usually so jam-packed with hustle and bustle, with empty streets – a deserted Federation Square that I’d walked through on the way to the Australian Open back in January or the usually bustling Bourke Street Mall area with little more than a handful of people and a tram.
I was lucky in that I had managed to get home for a visit in February before the world shut down – if I’d come home a couple of weeks later, I probably wouldn’t be writing about Melbourne right now but trying desperately to get my stuff shipped home because I wouldn’t have been allowed back in. Despite the considerably costly visa process my employer and I had gone through just before Christmas...
I think, with the first lockdown, there was maybe a sense of novelty about it, plenty of jokes about how staying at home and seeing nobody sounded like heaven, and all of that bravado. Zoom calls with friends from home became a weekly occurrence (except for one occasion when everyone forgot/was too hungover to partake!) and everyone became a baker.
I speak to my mother every few days and, while she always says she has ‘no news for you’, the shortest phone call has been around 45 minutes!
The point is, the lifestyle did, after a while, become a new normal, even though I hate that phrase.
The Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has been extremely cautious in lifting restrictions. He was criticised for not reopening things as quickly as other states but, even for anyone who’s never been here, most would know that there’s a big difference between Victoria and, say, the Northern Territory where, I reckon, even the coronavirus wouldn’t survive too long!
One of Melbourne’s biggest exports is its education sector – someone recently told me that the Australian economy stands to lose AU$3.1 billion in international student fees if those students are not allowed to travel into the country. Of that figure, approximately $1 billion relates to Monash University (which is next door to my workplace) and almost $700 million relates to the University of Melbourne (which is where I play hockey). The other big players are in NSW and Canberra.
So, like everywhere, there is pressure to reopen things and get the economy back on track and, to be fair, Melbourne had gone weeks without recording any notable increase in cases. Many of the original cases were travel related and the city had a robust hotel quarantine programme in place.
Or so we thought.
A couple of weeks ago, my mother rang me because she had read that the army was on the streets in Melbourne. It coincided with the lockdown of a number of north and north-west suburbs which had been identified as hot spots. It also coincided with worrying reports about breaches in the hotel quarantine programme which are now under investigation but, it seems, basically to amount to people who were supposed to be in quarantine leaving the premises – one guy, reportedly, did a shift as an Uber driver!
The army took over the hotel quarantine which, in my opinion, they should have been in charge of from the start.
Between that and the suburb lockdowns, including hard lockdowns of ten apartment towers that wouldn’t look out of place in J.G. Ballard’s novel ‘High-Rise’, it seemed a return to some sort of restrictions was inevitable.
When restrictions did lift I feel like I made the most of them in terms of getting out for dinner or breakfast, going to visit friends and making a couple of trips out of the city into regional Victoria, to Ballarat and Sovereign Hill – former gold mining areas.
For this round of lockdown I have a better set up and I’m working from home almost entirely. Back in April, we took a ten percent pay-cut and moved to working a nine-day fortnight.
This time, we’ve taken a further 10% cut and gone to an eightday fortnight. We all dream of three-day weekends but this isn’t quite how you expect it to come to pass.
My employer applied for the government support scheme Jobkeeper. But despite the investment he made last year, he could not claim that payment for me.
That’s an issue that seems to have affected a lot of foreign workers here and has left a sour taste for many as, understandably, businesses need support and, in the absence of financial assistance for a particular worker, they’re the ones who’ll be let go.
Still, I’m lucky. I have a job and, shortly after returning from Ireland, I was promoted to editor of our AV and Smart Tech magazine so the first cut didn’t hit quite as hard as it might have. In April, all the talk on the Irish in Melbourne Facebook groups was about how to get home. At the time, I half wondered if I shouldn’t be thinking the same way but figured a job in Australia was better than no job at home.
I even received a call from the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ireland asking if I needed any assistance which my Australian boss was very impressed by.
The whole situation has brought something else firmly to the front of my mind though and that’s the question of residency.
I got sponsored by my employer before Christmas, a temporary visa that gives me another two years in the country. The key word here is ‘ temporary’. If I left the country tomorrow, I wouldn’t be allowed back in until it starts to accept temporary visa holders again (mostly tourists and backpackers).
That might be in a few month’s time or, more likely, it may not be until the middle of next year, if even then. It feels a little like being in ‘checkmate’ on a chess board – whatever way you move, you’re screwed.
To that end, I’ve started exploring the option of permanent residency, something I was probably always going to do but perhaps not quite so soon after finishing the last visa slog. It’s an expensive and tedious process but my sister, who’s in NSW, has been through the process so that helps.
From a personal point of view, the biggest blow has been the cancellation of the winter hockey season which seems arbitrary but it’s my main social outlet in Melbourne and my link to about 80% of my friend group here. They’re the people
I visited when restrictions were eased, and the people who cemented any decision I’ve made about staying longer than the original year I came out for.
And of course, it goes without saying that being so far from home when all of this is going on is hard. In the beginning, I was watching the Irish press conferences and tracking those numbers more than I was the ones here. The idea of not being able to go home for maybe a year depending on what happens with international travel is tough to get the head around and hammers home that feeling of isolation even more.
Dan Andrews made a comment, quite a while ago now, that he couldn’t wait until he was able to tell Victoria to ‘get on the beers’ (and they say the Irish are obsessed with drink...)
We had a fleeting glimpse of it but now it looks like we’re further away from normality than ever.