Diary Entries

2020 has been a very tough year for us all so far but I believe that if we come together we will get through the hard times. If we work together we will get through the year and when we do it will hopefully be over. Everyone can go back to their normal lives. When we stopped school I did not like it but my sister loved it! She thought it was the best. I definitely thought it was a horrible decision but it happened and I could not stop it. I'm sure that everything will go back to normal and when it does everyone will enjoy it together. My hopes are up and they wont go down any time soon.

COVID 19 Story Hi, my name Is Andie, and I am currently living through COVID 19. I thought 2020 was going to be awesome, I was starting high school, going to make lots of friends, turns out it is the opposite. It started with the Bushfires which devastated Australia. At least 1 Billion animals perished, 2400 homes lost, 29 people dead and lots injured, and tens of thousands of people evacuated, including me. This was an awful way to start of 2020 and it was about to get worse. As the Government was thinking about How are we going to rebuild? Is the scorched land ever going to recover? We were hit with COVID 19. The COVID 19 prompted schools to shut down, people to remain inside their homes to contain the spread of the virus, and many more restrictions. The Chinese world health organisation was notified about the Coronavirus on Jan 9, believed to have started in a wet market in Wuhan. As the Virus gets bigger, spreading to countries all over the globe, we injured a 11-week learning@home. Luckily now there are 7,913 cases in Australia, 6,614 recovered and 103 deaths. In conclusion, from this experience I have learned to believe and hope. Believe that everything will be ok, and to hope that one day our world will be the same again. My high school life is returning to normal; we still must do the usual hand sanitise whenever you enter a classroom, but don't have to social distance. Through this I can’t doubt that I have felt anxious, but now I feel quite hopeful. To my future self, “You have lived through a global pandemic, fought of the fires, so you can overcome the bullying, heart break or trauma you may be going through. I love you.”

Shallow Shells. Khaled Elasmar Bankstown, NSW At the end, When you stand nowhere, In your room, In the noman's land of love, You feel lost, angry and impatient, You don't want to leave, Yet you don't want to stay, words become weapons in your interaction, any utterances lead you to more despair and disarray. The more you say I love you the less you feel it. Love in distance is like a half eaten apple, a half split moon, a broken galaxy and million of light years separate your shores, yet like a dying bright star, its light still shines through, beaming relentless memories of joyfull times, but all is an illusion and a mirage, but ours was a mirage of sorts, I couldn't hand you my heart fully, and you didn't reach mine deep down, you couldn't reach the mountaintops of unconditional loving. All I can say, Love is blind Love is blind, pitiful and spiteful. Love is laced with lacerated souls and bodies. We are shamelessly shallow shells of our past selves, so trapped and dugged in our trenches in the noman's land of love.

Continued from previous While I was back at work, I wasn’t able to see any friends for a couple more weeks. This was very difficult, and I did struggle emotionally. One Saturday I was in tears, all because a neighbour couldn’t meet up for drinks, socially distanced, in the garden. Normally this wouldn’t have worried me at all, but I suddenly realised I was being affected by not seeing anyone, other than the same people at work. Luckily a friend rang up and asked if I was interested in going for a bike ride (as exercise with a fried was allowed). Seeing a different person made a major difference to my mood. During this period it was the smaller items I missed most. Being able to go to the library to get books to read, going over to a friend’s place for dinner, going sailing. As I live in Sydney and my parents and brother, and his family, live in Canberra, I wasn’t able to travel to see them. The four day weekend for Easter was difficult, as I had very little to do, other than go for walks or bike rides alone. Normally I’d either be sailing, bushwalking or visiting family. I knew things were quiet when a trip to Ikea to buy an office chair was the highlight of the week. As rules relax, you appreciate simple things that you used to take for granted. Just going for a sail or getting access to library books has gone from something you took for granted to something that is exciting.

The man in familiar Orange Hi-viz and I are the two occupants of this suburban train carriage. He has his left finger on the trigger. In his right hand, the familiar chux. He avoids eye contact as he slowly makes his way towards me, shooting germs with pink fluid that squirts out onto the yellow & grey surfaces. I'm reassured rather than worried even though I'm hearing Psycho-like tense suspenseful music in my head. At the next station, a lady commuter hesitantly steps down the carriage's stairs, as if taken aback by the attendant in hi-viz. With the stern but polite voice of a school principal, the Sydney Trains familiar voice asks us to cough or sneeze carefully for the safety of other passengers. A young man with mask hanging below chin makes a sudden appearance, rushes in and fails to sit on the green marker as instructed by voice of authority. He throws himself on a seat immediately behind our new fellow commuter. I'm alarmed. What if?! God Forbid. We three commuters adopt the familiar detached look and look down into our mobile devices. Suddenly a phone rings. We're entertained by the young man's conversation. He mutters something about returning to normal. I can't help thinking about what 'normal' really is and will be. Perhaps it's a function of the cultural norm as well as the times. i.e., what Sydney people typically do, hear ... and that's clearly changing as I tap away. Oops.. got to get off.

COCKATOOS Perched comfortably up there in the penthouse of our skyscraper gums, a white cockie selects a spray of leaves, nibbles into the gumnuts and then simply drops it all. ‘Vandals,’ fumes the Tidy Gardener, shaking his rake at the flock and those hovering brush turkeys. I pick up a gumnut. Less than a centimetre wide, when dried and up-ended, out falls a pinch of seeds the size of a full stop. While I think about the size difference between seed and tree, an unseen larrikin drops single gumnuts that seem to target my head and shoulders. Hard hat, anyone?

Love in the Time of Covid. We have been isolating for more than 60 days. But this is not so strange for us as we live a fairly isolated life anyway, 50 kms from town and not a neighbour in sight. The most noticeable blessing is that this isolation did not occur during our three year long drought, as we would have been deeply affected. We had just staggered out of the dark tunnel and had a few weeks to rejoice in the welcome rain, when the virus appeared. Staying close to home has its benefits. There is little pressure to complete tasks as there is always tomorrow, there are few deadlines and less stress. It means there is more time to stop, pay attention and observe the world around us, especially the natural world. We listen for the glorious call of the birds each morning, see the barley shoots emerge from the soil and marvel at the size of the castor oil plants that have thrived in the paddocks. Our cattle are fat and healthy and we can barely see their heads above the grasses. The roos have left our garden and instead have made soft beds in the tall grasses alongside the road. When I walk, I hear the chattering of birds above me and on some days if I look up, I will catch sight of the pair of wedge tailed eagles that have a nest nearby. It is quiet here. And we love it. Few cars travel by. There are no planes in the sky and we have time to sit and meditate and be thankful for this land and for the country that we live in.

My sister and sister-in-law have lost their jobs and are now on the Jobseeker allowance. My sister works in early childhood care and my sister-in-law in a bank. Fortunately, they have husbands with good jobs and good incomes so they are OK. It hasn't been all bad. People have been drawn closer to one another. I am heartened by how nice people have been. Our little street is bubbling over with warmth. Cafés have opened up again with restrictions. I've been a few times for lunch. I look forward to spring when I can bask in the sun again at a local café sipping a cappuccino. The newspapers say the two most popular past times during lockdown have been home renovations and baking sourdough bread. I have been practising my French - watching films, reading, listening to TED talks in French and having French conversation practice over the phone with a gorgeous international student from Switzerland. She goes back in July. She's here for one year and what a year it's been for her with the bushfires at Christmas and now COVID-19. She's waiting for the borders to open to travel some more. I am really taken with the ACO (the Australian Chamber Orchestra). They have been regularly posting short performances online from their homes during lockdown one musician at a time. There has even been a cello performance of Bach at the beach! What an exhilarating performance that was with the sound of waves breaking in the background!!! How intimate the performances feel! You get to see the musicians as you wouldn't in a concert on stage. Thank you ACO. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra has started to do it too, posting short performances online this last week too. Thank you SSO. I am watching and listening. To be continued.

Negativity is such an evil thing, why can't people just be kind to each other. People need to just stop please, spread kindness.

KITCHEN TABLE RUCKUS The book I'm reading... "Kitchen Table Memoirs" is authored by famous Australian writers with long standing personalities: journalist, comedian, hospital, stage theatre, t.v. and radio workers, chefs, culinarian and restaurant critics, etc. Nick Richardson, who wrote the longest 10-pages Introduction in this book asked, "What makes your memory so different or similar to mine?" That question indeed has jogged my brain and triggered a memory about kitchen experiences; since I am the eldest girl in the family, my main task was centred in taking care of my members' insatiable gastronomic sacs. The kitchen was always my domain. I have my own hilarious childhood memory about a kitchen table. It was not ours. It was not our home kitchen. It was our hosts' long huge kitchen table made of a heavy wood. We young kids were all seated to eat first and the adults would have theirs after. Four of us siblings along with the hosts' children and other families' kids were told to be quiet and to behave while on the table of grace. Being a 'churchy people' they reminded us to pray first. My father having taught us how to pray was feeling proud to present his eldest son to say the grace. The little rascal grinned and obliged. He told us what to do, then he prayed: "Our hands we fold 
Our heads we bow 
For food and drink 
We thank Thee now. Amen." Except that he re-worded the last line with his own nincompoop's version, and said it in our local dialect -"Kalibang kanding" which when translated to English, it means "The goat shits" … Yes, the noun and the verb. I will leave everything in your imagination what happened next because I'm sure my father was silently hoping the earth would swallow him.