Items

• 
  2020-05-14

  The First Day Out

  This was taken on the first occasion that I left my hometown in almost two months of isolation. My partner and I went to Richmond, a town only ten minutes from my house and very familiar, but the act of leaving was peculiar after so long sequestered. The Richmond Bridge, featured in the image, is the oldest of its kind in Australia, a piece of convict heritage that has stood the test of time. Some of my earliest memories feature the bridge and its surrounds, and returning to that place at the beginning of a post-COVID-19 existence was a peculiar sensation. For me, it will now have dual historical implications, as a relic of the nineteenth century, and of the plague year.
• 
  2020-05-25

  A Gift From the Past

  The first person I visited when restrictions in Tasmania were eased the first time was a ninety-year old lady, a family friend and distant relation who knows all the stories everyone else has forgotten. I sat in her house for two and a half hours and listened to her talk about our family and all the people they knew, and I learned about a past that is rapidly disappearing as the people who remember it age. After my visit, she gave this glass to my mother. It was my great-grandfather's preferred glass at the local pub, and was gifted to this woman's husband after he died, as he was a great friend to my great-grandfather. She chose to give it to us thinking it would mean more for us than it does her. I had intended to visit Mrs Howlett for months, but life kept getting in the way. The pandemic afforded me the opportunity to explore my own past and the history of many other people in a way that I usually can't in everyday life, and this glass is a physical, tangible example of that experience.
• 
  2020-05-26

  Homeless being turned away as cool weather pushes Safe Space shelter to capacity

  As Tasmanians, saturated in the flood of online media content, look on at the state of the world, feelings range from extreme anxiety, compassion with those in crisis centres, to smug repose (“at least we are not in that country”). This last response seems particularly rife today, but it struggles to conceal an inherent coldness which we don’t otherwise normally like to attribute to ourselves. Not only does this attitude overlook that fact that we have our own dead, or that the cost of life is of a value that far outpaces numerical value (comparing our figures with death-tolls in other places), we ignore those without home in the very place in which all of us are meant to dwell together. Prior to the lockdown, Tasmania’s capital city Hobart underwent a housing crisis. But as we wait on Canberra to get things moving along - exactly as they were before or, even better than before - we should keep in mind that not everything is possible just because money is behind it. To return to the housing crisis: this challenges all of us to think about our responsibility towards those forgotten in our own home. Genuine responsibility begins with compassion, not money. I feel like, too often, we reverse the formula.
• 
  2020-03-20

  Sports Cancelled Due to Covid-19 Risk

  Sailing, as well as all other sports, have been cancelled or postponed due to the Covid-19 crisis. This sailing club, like many others is therefore shut for the foreseeable future. I chose this image because through all the years that I have been sailing (17 years) nothing like this has ever occurred before.
• 
  2020-04-27

  A Postcard From a Friend

  Sent to me by a friend who lives less than half an hour from me, this is an example of how the world has reverted in some ways during the pandemic. Written letters and postcards are largely objects of the past, yet this was an effort at analog connection in the digital world, one that required thought and care to produce.
• 
  2020-03-30

  A Victorian-Inspired Reticule

  This was the first thing I made during the pandemic. It provided an outlet for my excess energy at the beginning of the initial isolation period, but also allowed some community engagement as it was part of the Instagram movement in the sewing community, #sewcialdistancing. It provided an avenue for me to connect with other creators, and refocus myself at the beginning of isolation.
• 
  2020-05-26

  Have you got your dot? - COVID-safe UTas

  After Tasmanian restrictions were eased for the first time on Monday 18 May, these signs started to appear around the University of Tasmania's Sandy Bay campus. They show the university's response to allowing a limited number of people on campus daily and the safety procedure of having a temperature check and wearing a sticker to confirm that each person on campus is well.
• 
  05/18/2020

  Tasmanian Hospital Remain Closed to Visitors

  While some restrictions have begun to gradually ease in Tasmania, hospitals remain closed to visitors in order to keep staff and patients safe from the spread of COVID-19.
• 
  04/03/2020

  Balcony beers

  One of my best friends came home from Melbourne to be in lockdown with her family in Hobart. Her original flight to Hobart was cancelled, and in a twenty-four-hour whirlwind she ended up on the last sailing of the Spirit of Tasmania ferry instead. She had to quarantine for two weeks when she got to Hobart because she had travelled from interstate. This was before the policy of hotel quarantine came into force in Tasmania, so she got to stay in a family friend’s vacant Airbnb in Hobart CBD. I live really close by, and after a few days it felt too weird being so close and not seeing each other, so we decided to try a socially distanced catch up. I sat in the carpark behind her Airbnb, and she sat at the top of the stairs on her balcony. In the planning stages, we floated the term “window wine” (where you have a wine with a window in between you) but this turned out to be a “balcony beer” (where you have a beer and one friend is gazing up at the other loftier friend, like Romeo serenading Juliet). I am including this image in the Covid19 archive because it was the first time things sunk in. To me it is an image of a very uncertain time, right at the beginning of Tasmania’s lockdown, where we had no idea whether Australia would manage to flatten the curve, and had seen varying results in other countries in news coverage. We were frightened on one level, but at the same time we were so struck by the novelty of everything – it really felt like we were living in a new, different world.
• 
  05/01/2020

  Planting seedlings

  I took this photo after planting about a hundred seedlings in a newly fenced and prepared veggie patch at my Dad’s old place south of Hobart. Our veggie patch has three tiered beds so far. The other half is shadowed by the fence in winter, so we won’t plant anything on that side until the sun gets higher in spring. We turned through our composted food scraps and manure from roadside stalls to prepare the soil and added straw mulch after planting the seedlings. Before lockdown, I only came down here for a couple of nights each week and it wouldn’t have been practical to put in a veggie patch, with all the tending it requires. But after a couple of weeks settling into the place in lockdown my boyfriend and I got a permacultural itch. We got the seedlings from a local place called Dave’s Organic Seedlings. Dave had been under the pump since lockdown started, and so our assortment of seedlings was whatever he had left (may have an excessive amount of cabbages). I think lots of people had the same idea as us. In fact, it felt more like an urge than idea. Something primal in us needed to work with the soil, and to feel more self-sufficient. At the same time, not knowing how long lockdown would last, planting the seedlings made me feel even more locked down, like we’d bound ourselves to this patch (getting three chooks probably didn’t help either). But for now, it’s comforting to watch them grow.
• 
  05/19/2020

  Franklin restaurant announces it won't be reopening

  Franklin is the first high-profile Hobart restaurant to announce that it is permanently closing in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic. ABC News online describes Franklin as "one of the restaurants that helped build Tasmania's reputation as a foodie hotspot". While many locals dined in once or twice (usually on a special occasion), the venue relied almost completely on interstate and international visitors - a meal at Franklin, with a constantly changing menu of ever-surprising, (sometimes slightly ludicrous) locally sourced ingredients and a fabulous natural wine list was a must on the high-end MONA visitor circuit. I had the best glass of pinot noir I've ever tasted at Franklin. The general consensus is that the demise of one of Tasmania's most ambitious and well-known restaurants - perhaps the first major casualty of Hobart's food scene - is a portent of things to come. Covid19 will likely spell slow inexorable disaster for much of the hospitality industry here. With Tasmania's borders closed for now, it is an unfortunate reality that our most visionary and daring restaurateurs will likely be the hardest hit.
• 
  05/07/20

  The first day outside of home

  This photograph was taken of me the first time I left my home since I began self-isolation six weeks prior. It was taken in Richmond, a place only a few minutes from my home, but moving in that space, and seeing larger numbers of people was difficult after being isolated for so long.
• 
  04/28/2020

  Google Searches for Banana Bread - on the news

  This is a screenshot of the Alan Kohler's finance report on the 7 o'clock news in Tasmania, Australia. Kohler ended a characteristically dire covid19 financial report with this graph showing a spike in Google searches for banana bread in Australia. Firstly, this gives an insight into everyday life for Australians cooped up at home and trying to stay entertained and feel productive. Since making banana bread is usually a way to use up overripe spotty brown bananas, it also speaks to the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in households at the moment with everyone minimising their grocery trips. Secondly, it's a nice visual of the phenomenon of "lockdown trends" - like zoom parties, sourdough and seedlings, the more that people posted their freshly baked banana bread on social media, the more others felt inspired to do the same. I also think this item reflects the urge of media producers to find light in the darkness and remind viewers of the novelties of lockdown life. Finally, I think this screenshot shows the surrealism of life in Covid19, a time when Google searches for banana bread are discussed alongside plummeting stocks in a finance report on the evening news and with our newly developed Covid19 intuition this strangeness has become a normality. #HUM403
• 
  2020-03-29

  Pandemic Monopoly

  HUM402 The image depicts the creation of Pandemic Monopoly by a Hobart resident. The homemade board game uses toilet paper as currency, referring to the toilet paper shortage seen across Tasmanian supermarkets. The board game presents players with the opportunity to 'own' key Hobart locations. However, instead of mortgage, houses and hotels, the game allows players to buy hospitals and clinics to place on the properties. Centrelink, the Australian governments social security service, features heavily on the board game, indicating the rise in unemployment due to the pandemic. Whilst being used for comical purposes, the game also critiques the Tasmanian governments early handling of Covid-19 crisis via a chance card, which states "You have a fever, dry cough and Pneumonia to boot but despite having all of the symptoms, you haven't knowingly come into contact with a known carried so they won't test you for Covid-19. The Royal Hobart Hospital sends you home. Get out of iso [isolation] free." This refers to the Tasmanian government in early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic refusing to test individuals who had not been in contact with a known case, or had not left the country.
• 
  2020-03-25

  Australian Government formal COVID-19 mass text alert

  The Australian Government sent out a very curt mass text on the 25th of March to warn Australian citizens to follow COVID-19 guidelines. I chose this item because the timing and brevity was viewed by many as 'too little, too late'. It's a reflection of the fact that it took our government a week or two to absorb and act on the seriousness of the situation - not long before this message came out, the Prime Minister had still been encouraging people to attend football matches in high-capacity stadiums. Though the government eventually recognised the risk, and acted more decisively than some other countries, a large chunk of credit must go to Australians with the foresight to begin acting in advance of government instruction. By the time I received this message, my workplace had already been shut down to a work-from-home situation for a full two weeks, and the University of Tasmania's campuses had been shut down for five days. (HUM404)
• 
  2020-05-07

  Social distancing in stores

  HUM402 Social distancing has been implemented in stores to help slow the rate of Covid-19. These are some basic instructions on how to social distance in grocery stores.
• 
  2020-03-31

  Tassie Face Mask Project

  HUM402 The local community getting together for positive action against COVID-19. By sewing masks it's giving the broader community an active way to be involved as well as reducing stress on the low stocks of protective equipment.
• 
  2020-04-06

  Tasmanian premier clears Easter Bunny to enter the state

  HUM402 A light-hearted gesture to combat all of the negative news and loss of a traditional Easter holiday for many. Even though travel was prohibited, Easter egg hunts were still something to be looked forward to.
• 
  2020-04-25

  Social Distancing at the Supermarket

  This photo depicts a supermarket in Tasmania, Australia, where social distancing measures are being enforced. Red tape is used to create a line where customers have to queue prior to entering the store. The staff member to the left of the image is counting the customers as they enter the store to enforce the customer limit.
• 
  2020-03-27

  Studying during COVID-19

  The slogan on this image reflects the nature of studying in isolation during COVID-19. The image features on UTas student communication emails that provide information on the university's response to the pandemic. - HUM402
• 
  2020-03-20

  #behindthemoat

  This captures the island nature of Tasmania - Australian but not. I saw it the first day of a 14 day travel related isolation, a moat within a moat