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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.