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  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.
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  04/18/2020

  Kath Day-Knight's guide to isolation

  I found this really funny. It’s a very Australian Covid19 meme, using screengrabs from Kath & Kim, an iconic Australian TV show. Part mockumentary, part sitcom, the show’s eponymous characters are an outrageous mother-daughter duo who live in the fictional outer suburb of Fountain Gate. On reflection, the boredom, banality and mini-dramas of suburban life are actually a strangely perfect parallel to our lives in lockdown. Many of us feel like we are going slightly loopy. We may spend unusual amounts of time engaged in mindless activities around the house or garden. We used to squeeze thirty minutes of exercise or a trip to the supermarket into our busy schedules. Now we shape our weeks around these events. Once allowed to drink and smoke in the world’s bars and beer gardens, we are now, like Kath, forced to uncork the chardonnay night after night (or, let's face it, midday) in our own kitchens. Upon discovering this meme, I had been spending a lot of time drifting around the garden gazing at trees from different angles, watching birds and trying to speak to my chickens (Kath 4). My friend’s brother was sitting on an exercise ball in a work Zoom meeting, and a colleague asked him, “Are you sitting on an exercise ball?” He didn’t realise he had been bouncing up and down (Kath 1). Another friend has been on a reading craze in lockdown, devouring about one book per day-and-a-half (Kath 3). Which Kath are you today? #HUM402
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  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.