Tyranny of distance a blessing
Iarrived home from Hawaii on Wednesday after a 10-hour flight on the emptiest plane I’ve ever been on. The Air New Zealand flight crew provided their usual warm and professional service.
The airline is set to shrink with considerable job losses, and staff will no doubt be worrying about their futures, but you couldn’t tell.
Disembarking, I expected we’d be swarmed on by people in full protective gear, like a scene from the 2011 movie Contagion.
Instead, there were a just a few people, none with protective gear, who handed out cards, asked how we were feeling and checked we were off to selfisolate.
Walking through the mostly empty Customs area it felt like being in New Zealand in the 1970s when everything used to close on Sundays and TV didn’t play ads.
The most crowded part was the lengthy queue of people at the ticketing counter, their travel plans in disarray and trying to get home themselves. There wasn’t much distance between the people in line.
Still in the first week of isolation, my routine is pretty much like the person who posted on Twitter that they wake up at 9am and stare at their phone until 2am.
If I wasn’t staring at the phone I was watching the news and getting anxious.
Particularly after watching CNN, as I’m worried for my friends and former colleagues back in Hawaii.
The example of national leadership in the US didn’t inspire me with confidence and I must admit I’m relieved to be out.
I felt like the most paranoid person there and spent my last week isolated at home, surprised that for the most part, life seemed to be carrying on as normal.
As I left, though, Hawaii’s average number of 200,000 visitors a week had slowed to a trickle, a huge hit to the tourism industry. There were news reports that the number of people applying for welfare increased by 70 per cent in just one week.
Pacific nations such as Samoa, Fiji and Tonga have closed their borders but Hawaii – as a state of the US – is still open. The governor is just asking travellers to delay any holiday plans.
I’m trying to view life normally; to not be so anxious and to read and watch stuff that has nothing to do with this disease, but the shadow of Covid19 seems to hang over our country like a long dark cloud.
I worry about people losing their jobs; about people with not much to lose, losing it all and the fact that fears of a recession have been replaced by fears of an impending depression.
I worry about my mum, who is 71 and who is the guardian of my young niece and nephew who she still has to take to school.
The phrase ‘‘tyranny of distance’’ was first coined by an Australian author in 1966 to explain how Australia’s character was defined by being so far from its colonial masters in the UK.
Split Enz appropriated it for their classic song Six Months in a Leaky Boat to describe New
Zealand’s character. I’ve never been so glad of that distance; of New Zealand’s location at the bottom of the world surrounded by a big ocean that buffers us from the rest of the world.
But with our nearest neighbour Australia currently battling their own rising numbers of cases and fatalities, we can’t rely on that ocean keeping us safe.
We have to rely on each other strictly adhering to official government directives and doing the right thing – now, more than we ever have before.