Items

• 
  2021-08-08

  Revisiting the family archives - HIST30060

  In isolation, I found myself coming closer to my family. I was living in Melbourne at the time, away from my home in Tasmania, but maintained constant connection via video calling and messaging my family. One way I connected with home was by sharing old photos with my sister. This is one she sent me while I was in lockdown. It was taken around 2008. Trawling through thousands of old photos was an easy way to keep occupied during lockdowns, and I’m partially glad that COVID gave me the free time to do so as it was a fun way to bond with family and massage out the homesickness.
• 
  2021-09-16

  Escaping Melbourne - HIST30060

  This is a picture of Melbourne Airport (Tullamarine)’s Terminal 4. I flew out of Melbourne to get home to Tasmania just days before rising cases of the Delta variant forced state governments to shut borders once again. I remember the surreal feeling of passing through the airport then. Without the rush of people, the place felt gigantic. My eyes, typically drawn towards the way I needed to go, were able to refocus towards the ceilings, pillars and billboards. It felt like standing in a cathedral. As I was dwarfed by the sheer size of the terminal, I reflected on how COVID was reshaping billions of lives and world history as a whole too.
• 
  2021-09-15

  Going home party - HIST30060

  When the new Delta variant led Melbourne’s COVID cases to explode over the second half of 2021, smaller states looked set to shut borders with Victoria. Consequently, I had to leave my new home at in Melbourne to get back to Tasmania in late September. Not knowing when we’d all see each other again, my flatmates held a small party for me. We stayed up until 4am. This is a picture one of them took at the event.
• 
  2020

  HUM 402 assignment prompt, University of Tasmania

  Assignment prompt given to University of Tasmania students in HUM 402 by instructor Nicole Tarulevicz
• 
  2020-03-16

  COVID-19 Extracts from Personal Journal

  Mid-March. Thinking about all the things that have previously worried me this year that now seem mild and hilarious: moving alone to Tasmania; starting my PhD at a new university and finally meeting my supervisors; turning 28 (haha, actually). Now: Global pandemic; getting really sick; my loved ones getting really sick; state borders closing and being unable to return home even if I want to; my loved ones getting sick and not being able to travel to see them; the economy is destroyed, again. Late-March. It is what it is. What a rollercoaster this year has been, and we're not yet three months in. I've been staying home in self-quarantine for a few weeks now. The days are distinct for twenty-four hours; in the mornings I can recall the previous mornings; the afternoons, the afternoons. Every day I wake around 10am, at some point I paint, make food, drink coffee, stand on the balcony and gaze at the view. At the dining table J plays Catan ("it's your turn"; maniacal laughter; the sound of sawing) while I read. B set up the gym in the spare room and is continually showing me exercises effortlessly, while I struggle on a single push up. We stack wood in the woodshed, B and I come up with names for movies replacing words with toilet paper in one of a million Facebook challenges to bubble up during a time when all we have is time, and after weeks of watching the PM’s announcements as a house, we have all gradually stopped paying attention to the news. What is happening in Tasmania? That's all we care about anymore. I call home and [my parents] are cheery, full of house-plans and routine amidst the uncertainty. Recently J and I were discussing how we have different word associations - prior to all this I saw virus as being inherently technological, a computer term; he saw it as a verb, something penetrating and spreading. He said he felt concerned that we all use the same term but we might all be meaning different things, so how can anyone authentically communicate? I feel that inherently at the moment. I have a wonderful Zoom call with D and D and they are jovial, laughing, but also patient and understanding with my PhD fog. (Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am doing one at all, and it zips back into consciousness with surprise: wait, you're doing it? Now? All you do is sit in your house.) University is at least some kind of consistency. I write to M and A, I paint zealous red gouache flowers on the envelopes, I run to the post box and hold my hand out in the air after touching the handle as though drenched with invisible miasma. J and I collect pine cones at the Domain. When strangers approach from a distance every part of me screams stay away! They seem to walk directly towards us, magnetised, a collision course, and it is always our job to duck and weave to avoid crashing. Crashing means ‘breathing near’. Mid-April. I ask J how many weeks it has been not leaving the house. "I don't know", he says."Four? Five?" We count backwards. I was free on my birthday; the last time I went out for anything was a week after that, Me Wah. J remembers. "At least you got to sit in a restaurant", he says. He remembers mine and B's conversation to the word. I sense his mind is doing backflips in the emptiness, while mine is hazy and soft, a kaleidoscope of dreaming and staring into the flickering flames of our fire, looking at the soft Ghibli rain over the city, staring into never-ending mugs of steaming tea. There’s no need to ever be fully awake. We watch movies B picks out on Netflix (Psychokinesis; A Quiet Place), sip homemade cherry liqueur. We share treats. Occasionally we leave the house in an anxious flurry. People either look nervously as we pass them in the aisle, or not at all; oblivious, they bang into other people, walk aggressively, lean too close. J is frustrated and rattled. "I'm really grumpy", he says, roaring his car into the street. B and I silently look for teddy bears in the windows of people's houses. In our neighbour’s window is a brightly painted sign, ‘Thank you health care workers!’ One particularly cagey afternoon (of golden sun licking the garden in early April, flecked summer shadows, all a warm 20 degrees) I walk. I walk around the Domain and lip sync to repetitive pop songs and take photos of the trees and a fat rainbow parrot, and I move into the dirt to avoid people, always watching, mapping trajectories and walking speed in space. I get home sunburnt and make a fluffy coffee, drink it in the sun on the deck while J pulls up our kale and spinach and gives it to me to munch, pops the heads of tiny caterpillars with his thumbnail. He leaves one for me to do and when I squish it green blood splashes like a poorly made film crime scene pool, obnoxiously overflowing. There are many places I could be during all this that would be worse than here. Mid-May. This is new. The pressure has completely released. I don’t feel on-edge for a millisecond, instead deeply slow and content and watchful. Given-up and exhausted. When I was deeply drunk I looked around my room tearfully (a clear theme these days) and touched my hand to the wall and thanked the spirits of this old house, whether they were listening or not, the echoes and shadows and fingerprints and DNA of those who came before, for having me, and for their care during this time. After the months I have spent within this house I can’t not anthropomorphize the walls. It was a wider gratitude - for the dappled sunlight on the plants on the ledge in the kitchen, for the depths of the crackling fire, watching it lick and munch at the dry logs, for the deep sea breeze coming up our street, for the view of the houses and the stone church and the pines and the mountain drifting beyond the clouds, for the thick fat roses persevering deep into the late autumn, for the brass-golden sun burning my skin lightly in the late afternoon, for everything delicate and rare and wonderful I have been contained with on this property. While coronavirus is rapidly disappearing in Tasmania (knock on wood, we say, tapping our knuckles on the table, and then on our own heads) the rest of the world is gripped in it. Domestic travel is looking possible by July, at the earliest - international not until 2023, so likely after my PhD is concluded. For now, the directive is clear: stay put and stay healthy and don’t spread. Inspired by the frontliners M is considering doing a two-year intensive nursing degree, so by the time we’re both finished perhaps the world will be opened and we can move around and see it. Who knows what the future will bring - and this year, more than any other, the year the word ‘unprecedented’ was thrown around frantically, this holds true. Late-May. Today was nice. I walked aimlessly around the city, bought a coffee from Two Folks and waited eagerly in the alley for it to be ready since only one person could stand in front of the register on the X-marked tape at any given time (the childish thrill of in-person commerce); bought soap from Lush and laughed with the girl with sky-blue ombre hair behind the plexiglass - “Thank you for keeping me in a job!”, she said. People on the street seemed ready to smile at the slightest glance. There is a relieved, selfish joy in the air. At night I drank a bottle of wine and watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and as I always have laughed at every dark moment, and things felt preciously safe in this tiny pocket of the world.
• 
  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)
• 
  2020-03-28

  Beach Closed

  This is a local beach in southern Tasmania that was closed by the Parks and Wildlife Service (PWS) in an effort to curb non-essential travel and enforce social distancing restrictions. The image and the actions taken by the PWS indicates the extent to which COVID-19 impacted various facets of society and everyday life.
• 
  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.
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  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