Diary Entries

In these times of isolation, it has been strangely difficult to be alone. Three beloved young people have circled back home due to rental crises and being stranded overseas, and now all three are working from home. I escape the crowd by taking the dog for a walk but the roads and pathways are thronged by an unprecedented amount of people seeking exercise and fleeing cabin fever. The "covid19" dance of 1.5 meters around fellow walkers makes things just that more fraught. Being a solitary person, my enforced isolation is weirdly full of people. But I miss, how I miss, not being able to travel to the country. The weather, after the catastrophic bush fires, has been beautiful, perfect for camping and traveling. I sorely miss the framework of my year - the cancellation of the annual book festivals, theatre/opera events, family holidays and museums. I worry about the liberties being taken by governments who know that just getting through the day takes most of our attention. But, in spite of the dire circumstances that have forced my family into our own little bubble, I have treasured their wit, laughs and company as we drift together towards a very uncertain future. Personally, I have taken up sketch/drawing again and am cataloguing little vignettes of my garden. Doing language classes by Zoom and weekly Trivia with far flung friends and family is entertaining and gives shape to my week. I have drawn my cat A LOT. And my daughter and I "jam" together on our cheap ukuleles, sessions that I hope no one can hear. The birds still sing, the sun still shines, the sky is blue, the sea is always beautiful. And sometimes, it is really hard to believe that I could be days away from dying

Assyrian The COVID-19 crisis has taken its toll on many aspects of our lives. From health and welling to employment and family. During this, I am still thankful for my family and for still having a job even though for many of us it’s working from home. The uncertain times have also come with changes to things we would normally consider sacred to our hearts. For the Assyrian community and my family our faith plays an important role in our lives and empowers us mentally and physically and of course spiritually. For the past few weeks we have witnessed churches shutdown and normal Sunday services which would attract more than 1000 at our local Assyrian cathedral now have its gates closed. Not to mention for the first time Easter which would attract more than 10,000 parishioners was this year cancelled. This has left my family missing our holy services. Despite this, our church community has overcome this obstacle and we are thankful for our religious leadership for taking the initiative in setting up our services online which allows us to partaker in virtual mass on Sunday mornings. My family make sure we take every opportunity to not miss the virtual service, we wake up each Sunday morning, dress up as if we are going to church, set us our lounge room with a row of chairs, light up candles and place a big cross on the table in front of the TV with the amazing scent of incense burning to help recreate the environment we would experience at church. This has allowed us to re-connect spiritually with our faith and for what we are very grateful. In conclusion I would like to say to Hell with COVID-19! Life will go on and we will win the fight.

Anzac day. A day of commemoration and gratitude. When we come together as a country and remember those who gave their lives so we can live ours in a place of freedom. 2020 is different. We can't go to our local beach and stand with our fellow Australians. Covid 19 has created a wall that can only be demolished if we follow quarantine rules. Australians are strong. We will always find another way. My family collected milk cartons and cut the bottoms off to place a tea light candle in. I decorated the outside of the carton with sharpie and red nail polish to create pictures of poppies and 'Lest we forgot' on a cross. The day before Anzac day we placed the cartons on the front doors of my next-door neighbours and three other house on my street. At 5:55 the next morning, my family stood alone at the top of our driveway. We lit the candle and put our carton on the floor. My mum had the app on while dad put on the radio in is car, someone was giving an Anzac speech. My heart sank. No one had come up. I had put in all of that effort for nothing. Then I saw a light in the corner of my eye. A woman that I had never met before came up with her husband and put her candle on the floor. Then one by one, more people everyone I had given a candle to had come up and stood in their driveways. The ceremony had started and we listened to The Last Post through the radio. We had our minute silence and I let the tears fall down. We will never forgot the sacrifices that they made. We are forever grateful. We are Australian.

So after about nine weeks in self isolation, doing online school and not being able to see my friends, I'm finally back at school. This pandemic has made me realise how much I need to talk to people, other than my parents, being an only child in quarantine is very lonely. School is important, even though I don't like doing it most of the time. As a functioning human being, social distancing is hard, it's hard for a lot of people. (But for some people it's like heaven.) Unfortunately, we still have to do it. If we want this pandemic to decrease, then self isolating and social distancing is what we, as other human beings, have to do to ensure that. I'm kind of annoyed at the government though. They're forcing kids to go back to school or they'll fine the family $1000. Seriously? What about the anxious kids, the ones who are terrified, did they not take that into account? Well, at least we're better off than America.

Hello, my name is Mia Cable. It is currently the 22nd of May 2020. From late 2019 to this present day, a global pandemic known as Covid-19 has spread and has killed over 328,000 people. In Australia we have done many things to help prevent the spread of coronavirus and have helped one another feel reassured that our new rules can keep us safe. To help stop coronavirus we have had many rules put in place. We have had to practice good hygiene, social distancing, quarantine and isolation. Now we are almost half way through 2020, and a lot of the restrictions have eased and we can now return back to school and hangout with our friends. For about 6 weeks no one was allowed to see their friends or go out of their house unless if you were going to get groceries or to exercise. My experience with quarantine has been very boring but has also given me time to practice my surfing. Because we had to stay home from school, we had to do all of our classes online. I hated online school because I wasn't able to see my friends physically in class and sitting in front of a computer screen was quite boring and gave me countless headaches. To keep me busy, I played a lot of Minecraft with my friends. I also watched Netflix everyday and surfed almost every afternoon after school with my dad. Although the majority of quarantine was boring, I can now say that I have lived through a global pandemic!. It helped me to realise that school is much better then staying home and it made me very grateful for being able to hangout with my friends.

I am writing this so my children can read this when they have to study it. Coronavirus actually isn't as bad as you think, our family hasn't changed anything really, my Mum and Dad both work at a job that can't be shut down. Also, Australia's doing a good job with keeping cases low. It's actually fun to see how everyone is reacting with video colabs, and online friend catch ups! Only the old people really are in danger but we can easily buy food for them so they don't have to leave their home! But the real bad stuff is school, homeschool is really boring and going to class after class online is driving me up the wall (and onto the roof)! Thankfully we are allowed back at school now. ANOTHER BAD THING: Birthdays, it was my sisters birthday yesterday and she can't have a party because of government rules, this is stupid because: She plays with her friends at school but she can't invite THOSE SAME PEOPLE over to our house or even on our lawn and we have a really big lawn so everyone can social distance. With my birthday coming up, I hope the rules have changed. Another dumb rule: previously the government said that we can have 2 adults and their children over to a house, they changed the rules to give us more freedom, what did they change it to? 5 people can come over (adults or kids) we are a family of six, so with the new "FREEDOM" we can't visit anyone. 😡 (If the government reads this please change that, it is probably the dumbest thing you've ever done)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. This French proverb translates as – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Pandemics have happened before; they will happen again. The 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people; however, in June of the same year daily newspapers in the UK told readers to “maintain a cheery outlook on life” because it was no worse than a common cold. This tendency to deny or dismiss biological threats until they become impossible to ignore is a common characteristic of past pandemics. Another is the labelling of an illness as originating in one country or from one ethic group, which can lead to stigmatisation, as it did in Spain one hundred years ago. While our reactions to the threat of a pandemic show many similarities; fortunately, the way we react to them afterwards does not. The author, Arundhati Roy is quoted as saying that historically pandemics are “an opportunity to imagine our world anew”. She says that COVID-19 “should act a portal between one world and the next”. I share Roy’s optimism that society can learn and change in response to the current crisis. There has already been evidence of people becoming more caring of our planet and each other – especially the aged, disabled and vulnerable. After life returns to normality, I plan to continue my habit of phoning older loved ones to ensure they are OK and dropping care packages at their door. Lockdown is an opportunity to enjoy spending time in our homes, shopping locally and baking bread, but what will happen as restrictions lift? Will the lure of the hypermarket and the freeway be too great to ignore? There is so much potential for change … if only people choose to embrace it.

I wake up, the TV going wild (News Headline) CORONA VIRUS BREAKOUT. I think to myself, huh? What is this, I hear keys jangling, and hear a voice, WAKE UP EVERYBODY! I look at the door, it opens up , the worker gets shocked, looks at the TV and says, CORONA VIRUS! She finishes handing me the wash bag and leaves my cell and closes it with her keys. She discusses it with other workers. I think to -myself oh no my family. Then the news reports a death, and the symptoms and how it spreads quick. Now I worry, oh no, so I worry, so I have a shower and think and think about my family, I feel gut sick. I finish my shower and then dress and clean my room. The worker doing the checks , checks on me. I say hurry up and get us out, you are useless ( being worried bout my family)eager to call them and see if their fine. The worker reply's "Be quiet and the intercom gos off and repets "10 minutes boys make sure you shower and your room is clean". I buzz up saying please get me out. I want to call my family. They reply : 10 minutes mate, be patient.

We are some of the lucky ones during Covid19 because we still have jobs, so on the 23rd March when we found ourselves all working from home - myself my husband and our two teenage daughters, I suddenly became familiar with technology I had previously avoided and thought I could never use. I turned on Microsoft Teams every day, attending team meetings and mastering the art of turning off the camera and muting the microphone as chaos reigned behind the scenes. I zoomed Zumba and Yoga and my youngest daughter did a dance class after furiously tidying up our flat and moving everything to the side. We caught up for Friday work Happy Hour using Webinex although some people didn’t get the new link and sat by themselves in a virtual world while they wondered where everybody was. We tried to adapt to online schooling although it had it's frustrations like one morning when my older daughter couldn’t attend a class Teams meeting because she couldn’t access the link because she logged out of Edmodo and to reset the password she needed to access Google Classroom and she had logged out of that too. The NBN has held up pretty well with all of us using it at the same time but there are often refrains of “the net’s down” especially of a morning and some unfortunate captures of people talking midstream. Early on our local Facebook group was all about dobbing people in who did the “wrong thing" during Covid, like swimming at the beach when it was closed, but I understood their pleas they were doing the right thing why wasn’t everybody else, they had relatives in other countries warning them how much worse it could get.

Covid-19 has not really affected me, but I could only go to the optometrist today, because it was closed before. There was only 1 person allowed in at a time. You cannot eat at a restaurant. You have to get take away and go home. For school we had to work from home, and it was quite hard to work without the teacher being there. I worked from home for about 3 weeks, and now we are back at school and it is almost back to normal. We have to stay 1.5m apart from each other, use hand sanitiser a lot, and the school day is a bit shorter now. Working at school is way easier in my opinion. I hope things get back to normal.