Oh Sir! Times is hard.

“And may you live in interesting times!”

I remembered these words written in an English fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett as I stood in my kitchen gazing out the window to a drought-eaten lawn in the scorching, late-Summer afternoon light.

This is New South Wales, Australia in early January 2020.

The media flung contrary theories about the state of the present situation. Either by arsonists or natural causes, likely an exacerbation of both elements combined, the majority of our nation was being ravaged by uncontrollable bush fires. Queensland and New South Wales were being eaten by flames. Evacuation plans in progress, the public told to gather what they could and get out now. Our fire fighters and voluntary emergency services staff worked in shifts, day and night in the blistering heat of summer. We’d not seen rain for the better part of ten months or more in most of the country. Water restrictions at their highest. Those multi-million dollar desalination plants were looking pretty good about now.

If only it would rain!

These blazes went on for months. Destroying thousands of homes, killing wildlife, flora and fauna indiscriminately. And taking so many humans with it as well.

Illogical as it may seem, I took cold comfort in thinking that each precious life lost now shone as an eternal star in our solar system. A marker. There are so many of them.

Every day I would boot my browser window at work to open the Rural Fire Services website and assess the fire maps. Horrified, as thousands of hectares of fire ravaged lands turned into hundreds of thousands. Careful calculations. My fire plans reviewed. The highways shutdown throughout western and north-western regions. How long would it take my family and I to escape if we had to? And without safe heaven or many willing relatives, where would we go? How much would our insurance cover?

Isn’t it always the way? You spend some hours in your driveway washing and polishing your car to a brilliant sheen. No sooner do you put your cloth away that the skies burst open a torrent of rain to destroy your hard work.

No sign of rain for months. Fire and emergency services exhausted and frayed. In a last ditch bid to coax a few droplets, I went outside with a sponge and bucket of water. I washed my car.

I washed my father’s car. I would wash my neighbor’s car and his neighbor and even that woman’s two towns across. I would wash as many cars as needed if only it would bait rain.

So can you imagine then, the national collective sigh that was expired as finally…finally…. The rains came! First as showers, scattering across the country. The Board of Meteorology excited. A cyclone was predicted to be rolling in off a low pressure system on the coast. And when it finally hit, this Tropical Cyclone Damien, it brings torrential rains and gale force winds.

With it, balls of hale as big as tennis balls, flooding, landslides and coastal erosion. Yes, thank you Mother Nature. If we do not all burn to death, weeping in the ashes of our fire-gutted remains, we are drowned by torrents of water, breaking the riverbeds and threatening the dams to burst, crushing us under the weight of furious storms.

A little middle ground perhaps? Do I ask for too much? Clearly. Well, we got the water we so desperately needed. And the mega-fires that were roasting the nation were extinguished in a matter of days. Something our human resources were unable to contain at their massive scale, despite months of frantic intervention.

We are living in interesting times.

I along with everyone else across Australia, mopped our sodden brows as the storms passed. We would rebuild. The way we have always done before. Nothing tests the metal of a community than crisis after crisis.

I grew fearful of watching, reading or listening to the news.

The joy I felt as I stood surrounded by friends at midnight watching in awe as the skies exploded in fireworks to ring in the New Year was tarnished by my collective conscience internally screaming: “Oh, what the f*** now?!”

On Valentine’s Day I enjoyed the irony of working my last day of paid employment. My department shut down abruptly. The end date of my contract brought forward by four months. I hugged my colleagues and wished them goodnight for the last time.

I knew my contract was due to be up soon. Crippled by the irrational fear of re-writing my professional resume in the midst of soul-searching. Locating an identity. Wanting to find a job that was not survivalist anymore but offered genuine fulfillment. Whatever that means.

Never mind. The closure of one door will surely be overshadowed by the opening of many more. There is time.

And I was not the only one to suffer loss of employment. My father’s life was transitioning into a new phase as well. Macular degeneration and a fast advancing cataract meant his already compromised vision was now classed as clinically impaired. He’d have to hand over his driver’s license for many months and suspend his work indefinitely whilst he waited in queue for eye surgery. As the only other driver of a busy household, all the driving tasks would now become my responsibility. I was up for this challenge. Time management being a forte of mine.

Now things were getting interesting. I had no job with which to support myself, a mortgage to pay overheads for, a father whose sight was deteriorating slowly and an identity crisis brewing steadily in the background.

Meanwhile my best friend of many years whom I had met whilst working a desperation job that we both eventually escaped from (not unscatched) was planning a modest wedding in late March.

I would at a minimum require shoes to compliment my bridesmaid’s dress and gift of cash to give the new bride and groom whom were saving for a European honeymoon. Where the hell would I get the funds for all this?

My mobile banking app reflected my last twenty-nine dollars. There was nothing for it. I did what I thought was the responsible thing and contacted my unemployment office. I filled a great deal of paperwork, carefully adhering to their requirements and submitting all documents as requested online. I would follow the bouncing ball whilst looking for work and realized that another survival job may well be a very real possibility whilst I looked for a “dream job” that let me work closer to my ideals. Choices were getting thin.

It wasn’t long before I awoke to a peel of morning headlines that would change the course of civilization as we knew it. COVID-19 was announced. An aggressive respiratory virus first discovered in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December of 2019. People move, migrate, travel and inadvertently bought with them one of the most infectious diseases of modern history. In a matter for a weeks the World Health Organization called it a Global Pandemic. Those nations who responded aggressively to locking down boarders and implementing temporary measures to control the population saw a significantly less grim horror story to others whose numbers, garnished or otherwise, spiked into many thousands of infected across the globe.

So many new stars join the skies every day for every loved one lost.

Hysteria and mass panic become an unavoidable side-effect of the human condition when there is no clear cut answer. Misinformation and conspiracy theories do nothing to calm a disturbed mind. The death tolls are so high and so rapid, in some cases spinning wildly out of control. Some of us don’t function well to being told: “At the moment, there is no vaccine, no cure.”

Irrational behavior follows a loss of control.

In a capitalist, consumer driven world where we are told we to buy things to ease our problems, we herds of people doing just that.

Buying.

In Australia it started with the confusing, somewhat irrational trend of stripping every supermarket shelf of toilet paper. People, brawling in the aisles of an otherwise civilized store, swearing, name calling, throwing punches, becoming violent to one another of this simple, mass produced commodity. Did they believe that this disease would suddenly cause violent gastrointestinal disruptions? That their bowels would constantly and frequently explode leaving them with no choice to but to beg a family member to bring yet another 12 rolls of paper so as they might clean the mess?

As to that, panic buying got progressively worse as the weeks went on. A lady in a supermarket told me the next item being hoarded ravenously was meats of any kinds.

I acknowledged her concerns and left the store with my modest tea concession quickly.

It was not until the following day that I wondered down to my local supermarket at about 6PM when what I saw chilled my spine.

Almost every single edible item imaginable had been taken leaving nothing but empty shelves. No fruits, no veggies, no meats, deli items, dairy, eggs, baked goods or otherwise remained.

Shelf after shelf had been stripped bare. No canned foods, or raw ingredients remained. If fact anything that was edible was just gone. And that included all the pet food, fresh and canned. It was the same, aisle after aisle of nothing except glassy eyed staff working on automatic, cutting down the empty boxes and displays. I found lonely blocks of chocolate, bags of confectionery, stationary, cooking utensils, cosmetics and cleaning hardware left behind. Every freezer was empty. There was hardly any point the supermarket remain open. They had virtually nothing left to sell.

I stalked out slowly, returning my hand basket to its stack. A mother holding her toddler daughter in arms stood at the self-service register offered me a tired smile that I returned as her child announced she was hungry.

“I know.” Was the response I heard as I left the shopping village and returned to my car empty-handed.

How long was this going to go on for?

As I drove the short distance back home a certain phrase came to mind: “The people will eat each other.”

I shook my head, horrified. We are not living a chapter of ‘Lord of the Flies’. Surely.

My family greeted me as I entered the living room and asked if I had brought home anything to make for dinner.

“There was nothing to buy.”

“What do you mean?” Asked my incredulous mother.

I unlocked my phone and showed her a photograph I had taken of the empty store.

“There was nothing to buy.” I repeated as she stared at the screen indignant and confused.

I did not sleep well that night for want of thinking about that empty supermarket. Its haunted, tired looking staff and bare chrome shelves. Unusual dreams plagued me and when I woke the following day, my father gave me an itinerary of the news. Strict new distancing laws in place, limits on purchases and an aggravated address from our Prime Minster urging people to be rational. To stop hoarding at once. There’s no need for this crisis buying, there is no food shortage, and we will not be locked in our homes for months on end. To be rational and responsible.

I saw the domino effect. One shopper sees limited supplies and purchases one extra, ‘just in case’. Hundreds of others with the same rationale follow suit and before you know it, it happens again. The stores are empty. There’s nothing left to buy.

I caught myself throwing up options to survive if my family and I became unable to purchase rations when three days later I attempted to go grocery shopping with my father to find that a simple 30 minute excursion for essentials took a multi-suburb 4 hour trek to 6 different stores just to hunt down basics.

If this would continue, I would apply for a hunter’s weapon license and travel off-grid to hunt down a wild kangaroo, portion the animal and freeze it thereby generating a few weeks supply of fresh meat for my family.

I shook my head violently to dispel the thought. It wouldn’t get to that…. Would it?

And here we are, April 4th 2020. Some four months later and we as a people all share some very common traits.

We are all in stages of isolation.

Many of us are unemployed or working remotely.

One days blurs a little into the next unless broken up by conscience routine.

If ever you had felt everything was just going too fast and wished the whole world would stop a moment – Then I assure you, it has. This is it. We’re living it.

Hyper-connected, information in-undated. Isolated.

This was not the 2020, I was expecting.

These are interesting times.

- Gia Damont || 7th April 2020