Pandemic

For many of us, the long Melbourne lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were emotionally ambiguous affairs. Feelings ranged from anger over the deprival of basic freedoms and hope and despair over daily case numbers, to relief at being forced to stay at home, Zoom into work in our pyjamas and dispense with the daily commute. Some of us discovered our neighbourhoods for the first time or new interest we could cultivate, such as baking sourdough bread or gardening. That said, we probably don’t want to revisit the experience anytime soon. But we should, argues Chip Le Grand in his new book, because while Melbourne’s ‘status as the world’s most locked-down city should be cause for neither pride nor shame’, it should not be forgotten. Beginning with a vivid account of the ‘unlawful’ lockdown of housing commission towers in Melbourne’s inner north, Le Grand asks: ‘How did a city like Melbourne arrive at a place where we would strip people of all agency, and finally, their dignity, in the name of public health?’ This book is an account of how this happened.

Scott Morrison needn’t waste time writing a political memoir: the work of self-vindication has already been attempted on his behalf by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, both columnists at The Australian, in their now highly controversial book Plagued: Australia’s two years of hell – the inside story. Theirs is a largely heroic story about Morrison’s leadership, which ‘served the nation well’ amid a ‘most extreme period of adversity’.

Most people, and certainly most politicians, don’t spend much time or emotional energy thinking about whether human life on this planet will still exist in one hundred years’ time, or what efforts might need to be made right now if we and our descendants are to avoid extinction.

Bruno Latour’s new book, After Lockdown: A metamorphosis, is so engaging from the first that one feels obliged to begin just where he does: with an arresting portrait of a man who wakes from a long sleep to find that everything, save the moon and its indifferent rotations, makes him uneasy. Everywhere he sees reminders of the lost innocence of the Anthropocene. The sun brings to mind global warming; the trees, deforestation; the rain, drought. Nothing in the landscape offers solace. Pollution has left its mark everywhere, and he feels vaguely responsible for it all. And now, to top it off, the very breath that sustains his life carries the risk of premature death. How many of his neighbours might he infect (or be infected by) amid the vapour trails of his evening walk? Nature, it seems, is having its revenge, and the ‘in-out-in’ of lockdown threatens to become interminable.

How will the year 2020 be remembered? No doubt the headline event was the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered schools, factories, and hospitality services, leading to a contraction of per capita income for ninety-five percent of the world’s economies. For Europe, the acrimonious exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union would serve as a stark reminder of how fragile supranational institutions are in the face of popular fury. Following the murder of George Floyd, similar rage at police brutality marked a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which preceded a combative presidential election that denied Donald Trump a second term. And the world endured one of its hottest years on record, with surface temperatures reaching nearly one degree above the 141-year average as fires burned through Australia and the United States.