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  2020-09-26

  Family Fights

  HIST30060 My family is pretty large: I have two brothers, a sister….and a whole menagerie of animals! Gracie dog is the best, but we also have another dog, several cats, a rabbit, and a variety of feathered friends. My siblings live interstate, so we’ve been barred from seeing them since February because of border restrictions. During lockdown, we’ve been keeping in touch by having consistent arguments on our family group chat about how to rank our pets from best to worst. My brother frames it like a ‘best and fairest medal’, as you’d receive in sport. The conversations remind me of when we all used to live together at home, and they’ve provided a nice reprieve from more ominous discussions about the pandemonium enveloping society. I think the notion of ‘reprieve’ is central to the power of animals in this plague year: they distract us from our pandemic woes and force us to take a sabbatical from our anxieties.
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  2020-04-17

  Second Adolescence

  This photo is of my little brother, who is sixteen this year, as we were spending time together on the balcony of our house. This was out of sheer desperation in terms of getting out of the house, even though it is freezing outside at this time of year in the afternoons. For two months during lockdown my brother and I spent more time together than we probably have in the last three years combined, given that I am ten years older than him and have lived out of home up until last year our relationship was always a bit like ships passing in the night. In addition to that our relationship has always been vaguely parental due to the age difference (and possibly my own gendered conditioning to adopt a caregiver role), yet in this period I have had such a strange feeling of emotionally revisiting my adolescence due to the amount of time I am spending with my brother and cousin who is eighteen, which has been such a strange and disorienting experience. I feel like this has been such a pointed sensation for me as someone who doesn’t drive, and with public transport it is just bearable as I have some access to independent travel. But when I could no longer go anywhere at all without my mother driving me, I felt like my identity as a capable adult essentially crumbled overnight. There are elements to this that are positive, I feel like my brother understands me much better now and my relationship with my cousin borders more on the side of best friends than cousins in a way that would probably not have happened if I hadn’t been forced to put aside the cloak of adulthood which made me essentially relate to my cousin from a caregiver perspective.