Diary Entries

Ruby Princess Cruise ship with a royal name where on earth is your domain? When tourist dollars flex their might who cares if it is our right, to know where you go. Saying nothing when you departed for the Tasmin Sea. It is our way to just let it be, for nothing can be changed when nothing’s to be gained for you and me. Good-bye Ruby Princess Who will pin the blame on you? If your covid cases grow, let the health inspectors know. Bon voyage! We’ll miss you. Transformed from a ship to a destination. The spread of covid causing consternation. One in ten cases from your disembarkation! Adding to the devastation twenty lives are lost. Oh what a cost! Good-bye Ruby Princess You should hang your head in shame. With covid cases growing daily We will never miss you! Sydney waved you and your sisters away, your crews still languish in Manila bay. Stranded, some jump overboard, others in one last desperate accord, undertake a hunger strike. “Tickets now on sale to wherever I like!” Cruises set sail at the end of September “It’s the all you can eat buffet and casino I remember!” Good-bye Ruby Princess Who dare pin the blame on you? Record bookings taken daily Boy, we really miss you!

Ruby Princess Cruise ship with a royal name where on earth is your domain? When tourist dollars flex their might who cares if it is our right, to know where you go. Saying nothing when you departed for the Tasmin Sea. It's the Australian way to just let it be, for nothing can be changed when nothing’s to be gained for you and me. Good-bye Ruby Princess Who will pin the blame on you? If your covid cases grow, let the health inspectors know. Bon voyage! We’ll miss you. Transformed from a ship to a destination. The spread of covid causing consternation. One in ten cases from your disembarkation! Adding to the devastation twenty lives are lost. Oh what a cost! Good-bye Ruby Princess You should hang your head in shame With covid cases growing daily We will never miss you! Sydney waved you and your sisters away, your crews still languish in Manila bay. Stranded, some jump overboard, others in one last desperate accord, undertake a hunger strike. “Tickets now on sale to wherever I like!” Cruises set sail at the end of September “It’s the all you can eat buffet and casino I remember!” Good-bye Ruby Princess Who dare pin the blame on you? Record bookings taken daily Boy, we really miss you!

Part 2: Autumn 2020 Still reeling, spinning in this great sadness, the strains of a distant virus veer us towards an autumn of austerity, anxiety. Towards a ring a round of facemasks, a handful of sanitiser. No symptoms, no symptoms So many, fall down! In the blink of two weeks, the budget and the imperative are in reverse: From “Evacuate! just leave home! To “Isolate! Just stay home!” Just stay on the line at home! (Do not line up at Centrelink!) Pollies pontificate, calculate, finally COLLABORATE! Obediently the people self-isolate! From their stage, heads of state Postulate. Self-congratulate! Bump elbows, shake hands! “Didn’t they just say…?” Ours is not to reason why? Ours is not to make reply. Ours is but to” …try not to die! Don’t forget to wash your hands mate! Before you thumb through the scripted flipchart of ‘Canned Responses to Difficult Journos'. “Hang it all, surf’s up in Bondi!” Beach is closed! Ours is but to …self-isolate, ruminate, procrastinate. Teach our children, debate the merits of yet more screens. More screens, but no screening for the virus, yet! Panicked, people hoard loo rolls, pasta and rice. “Stop it! Just stop it! It’s unAustralian”. Profiteering politicians hoard oil. Store it! We’ll store it in Trump Barrels It’s for Australia! In collective insanity we vacillate now racked by global grief, now laughing hysterically at bald faced hypocrisy. But mostly, we feel loss. The acute loss of those who die ALONE. A loss exacerbated by the callous disregard for the common man and the uncomfortable, fidgeting silence across the Atlantic. Season upon season of sadness we isolate, hibernate, separate. Separately desperate we medicate on caffeine and wine. Trying not to whinge and whine, for we are the lucky ones. As it turns out, today we are the lucky ones!

Seasons of our Sadness Part 1: Summer 2020 It seems overwhelmingly endless, our Season of Sadness. Dazed, we spin like children on a merry-go-round of rings and rings of fire and hosepipes full of water, smoke clouds and ashes and trees raining down. We hardly notice as spring melts into summer. A summertime where the living is uneasy, flames are jumping and the temperatures are high. Unsettled we watch, wide eyed we wait. Our nostrils filling with the acrid smell of smoke, our eyes with tears, from the brown haze that hovers over everything, as the trees rain down. All spring and summer long the cry echoes from state to state “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” And all the long while the pollies deliberate, ruminate, speculate. Carbargo residents irate with hands-in-pocket leaders who procrastinate! Can’t they see? Don’t they know? Fitsimmonds and the firies are our heroes now! Surrounded by megafires and hosepipes with no water. Exuding smoke and ashes, a hundred homes burn down. Lives destroyed around us as a hundred homes burn down. Apocalyptic, summer casts a black towel of terror across our shoulders as voracious flames lick at the salty waves of holidays. Abandoned, stranded, vulnerable we take to the water. In fires past we counted only human homes, human lives lost. This spring, this summer when the trees rained down, our collective conscience tells the toll of helpless beings whose feathers and bones lie washed up on the shores of inaction. Our inaction. Our missing in climate action.

Covid Corvids. April 2020 Always from the north, strung out like stars across the sky, they came. Growing louder, larger, in ever increasing flocks. Crops stuffed with glazed-eyed travellers mechanically pecking at packets of nuts. Tipping wine into upturned mouths. Torsos squishing into seats, limbs pouring over armrests like Angophora roots over rocks. Never ending waves of stiff winged corvids. Disgorging swarms onto tarmac wastelands like a plague, a virus. Before once more rising moving money and men, filling the sky with noise and pollution and people. Once upon a childhood, catching distant vibrations of an approaching roar we’d race each other outside. Chins jutting upwards, bare feet twirling bodies in circles, small hands sheltering foreheads, thumbs curling under eyes making imaginary binoculars searching blue African skies. Eager to be first to spot it, to point it out, to decide where it was going. China, America, England, Australia! In our world, no plane ever arrived! Now, stars seldom travel from the north over Sydney skies. Elastic stretched, beads smaller, gaps between them growing larger. Overstretched, the sparkling necklace breaks. Stringing washing on the line, I hear the roar of a solitary aircraft. Looking up I wonder... Could we once more stare in awe, marvelling at the magic of our flight?