Art from lockdown

Some reflections 5 years on from Covid

Hello! This post ended up being super long, so if you’re reading via email the bottom might get cut off.

5 years ago, on the Friday of the weekend Melbourne went into lockdown, we had an event at my work scheduled.

I remember driving around looking for last minute supplies (hand sanitiser and face masks) while the radio hosts talked about this new disease, pandemics, what might happen. The weather reflected the strange, frantic mood of the people on the streets; it was hot but overcast with a big wind shaking the trees and blowing leaves and dust down the road.

I found the hand sanitiser and face masks after searching four or five shops which had been stripped clean. They were both outrageously expensive and there was a limit on how much you could buy. But, my work at the time had deemed that unless we were told all events were off, our event would go ahead with ‘safety precautions’ in place.

The event was a success although not crazy busy. I think the fear of sickness kept some people at home. After, we went out as a team for drinks. Then, one of my colleagues convinced me to go out nightclubbing with him, despite the fact that I’d been on my feet non-stop since 6am. At 4am, utterly exhausted from dancing, I caught an Uber home driven by a lovely African guy who showed me pictures of his daughter.

It would be the last normal night out for a while. That weekend, we went into lockdown for the first time.

Uncertainty reigns

In Melbourne, the first lockdown was supposed to go for 2 weeks. It lasted 43 days. Over the next year and a half, Melbourne would break world records for the amount of time spent in lockdown, eventually reaching a whopping 263 days.

A struggling restaurant during one of the brief pauses between lockdowns.

What did that look like? You were restricted to within 5km of your house. Shops, bars and restaurants all closed (some never to reopen). There was no leaving the house except for food shopping and two hours a day exercise, with cops checking your ID in the park to make sure you weren’t from outside of the 5km radius. There was encouragement to dob in your neighbours and fines for people breaking the rules. It was illegal to travel interstate or internationally.

I grew very familiar with the view out Martin’s window.

The first part of lockdown felt, funnily enough, like a holiday. Working from home (or, in my case, being unemployed) was a novelty. I’d moved back home with my dad and had sublet my room in my share house while I was unemployed, but in reality I spent majority of my time at the house of the boy who was not yet my boyfriend (he would soon become my boyfriend, and then later my fiancé, and then finally my husband). One time I stayed at his house (which he shared with his housemate, Lucas) for 3 weeks straight, only going home when I ran out of clean clothes.

I did a lot of sketching of things around the house, including chairs…

… and homewares.

Our days were spent cooking meals with produce from Martin and Lucas’ garden, watching movies, walking around the empty streets of Collingwood. I made art, journaled, and started figuring out how to become a freelancer. I remember spending a whole afternoon lying on a patch of sun on Martin’s bed, looking at the clouds floating past the window and thinking very long thoughts.

And then it was no longer fun.

I can’t remember at what point the isolation started wearing down on us. The atmosphere grew heavy. The daily briefings where we were told case numbers and the number of dead, the police roaming the street telling old and disabled people they couldn’t stop to take a rest on a chair, the sense of hostility and fear.

A short comic I made when we were going into our second lockdown. I was still surprisingly optimistic at this point, thinking it would be over fairly soon.

We supported each other as best we could, but I’m not going to lie… it was a tough time. I turned to crochet and watched a lot of old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. At the end of the day, my housemate Louise and I would put on Bag Raiders at full volume and dance around the house with a beer to try to lift our spirits. I tried to wake up every day for the sunrise and make art… but eventually succumbed to the warm comfort of my bed instead.

Louise wearing a tea cosy I’d crocheted as a hat.

Lockdowns would be announced suddenly at 5pm and have people scrambling to get home from across state lines, or risk getting stuck in another state. People got stuck overseas and were unable to return home for more than a year. People died and people gave birth with no one allowed at their bedside.

And through all of that, we kept showing up to work every day.

Eventually the restrictions would lift. QR codes became the new normal, face masks became less and less common, old and forgotten signage in cafes about washing your hands curled at the corners and turned yellow. Borders reopened, Martin and I managed to flee to Mo’orea.

Looking back, it was such a strange experience to live through. It almost doesn’t seem real.

Making art through the hard times

I made this little comic for a friend who wanted to make a zine during lockdown. She was going to call it Quaranzine, which is only the most perfect name in existence. Unfortunately Quaranzine never got off the ground so this comic has been sitting on my phone, unpublished, for 5 years.

Enjoy the lockdown as narrated by Louise’s cat, Morty!

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