Lockdown flashback

On dealing with Covid - in the house and in the novel

We’ve got half a household full of Covid this week and while we all stay at home til we see how it plays out, it’s feeling a little like 2020. The stats say there’s a 24% increase in positive tests in Vic in the last week (but who even logs them any more?) and the general chat about town says it’s everywhere. Not that it’s ever gone away, but with scarce media coverage, I had to google what one is supposed to do these days when they get that positive test.

It’s both impossible and kind of triggering to remember lockdowns. I sifted through the journal I kept while writing The Hummingbird Effect. It’s a catch-all document. Cut and pasted research, notes to self, to-do lists, ideas, dot points that suddenly roll into a paragraph of prose: currently nearly 200k words, it charts four years of work. And a pandemic.

July 13

Back in lockdown and feeling all the feelings. Can’t even begin to think about getting through this next six weeks

Feb 15

Lockdown again. Spent an hour this morning thinking that A could have tier 1 exposure and we could all be in 14 day quarantine but not so thank fuck. Close though.

May 26

Fucking lockdown fucking covid again what a fucking nightmare

5^th august

Holy holy hell. Maybe there is going to be a lockdown and I just can’t. I am nervous and distracted and can’t think and don’t want it and can’t this just be fucking OVER. PLEASE, please just let it be over.

August 16^th.

And there you go. Another two weeks lockdown. No parks. A curfew. Jeepers.

When the pandemic began, I was deep into writing what I thought was straight up historical fiction set in a Footscray meatworks in 1933. Slowly but surely the times we were all living through seeped into my novel - then exploded it. My search terms ‘of ‘meatworkers’ and ‘abattoirs’ and ‘conditions’ were suddenly bringing up top news hits. The ideas I was exploring about women and invisible labour sifted up from their usual quiet murmuring to a great roar. The world tilted and for a time became unimaginable. We worried about my grandmother, terrified of what would happen if she had to go to hospital or into care. The novel morphed under my fingers.

Image of a section of text from The Hummingbird Effect - Hilda’s story. Part transcript in newsletter below.

The Hummingbird Effect became a multi-generational story of women, love, consequence and kin. Instead of a span of one year in the 30s, the novel stretched out from 1933 to 2181. One narrative became Hilda’s - an 86yo woman living in Aged-Care as the first March 2020 lockdown hit.

It felt good to write it out. Like I’d purged my rage and uncertainty and anxiety onto the page. But after (or what felt like after) - what to do with this section of ‘lockdown lit’? How might a reader deal with it? Would a reader in Melbourne feel the same as a reader in WA? How close to the bone could I take them?

I messaged my girlfriends - what words do you think of immediately when I say lockdown? I trawled through our old WhatsApp messages. I searched headlines and press releases from each lockdown. I reread the poetry of my wonderful teacher Ania Walwicz who we had lost during the 2020. I wrote like my hands were on fire.

please be patient while we get your order to you back to normal

out of quarantine out of hospital don’t be selfish selfless self-care

go out on your balcony and clap thank the health workers howl at

the moon before you break down break news break-through case

we broke up you broke out just breaking down those numbers for

you now the disease is spreading human to human bat to human

through the 5G network via droplets when you cough sneeze

when you are less than three feet when you are inside when you

touch when you breathe the same air for fifteen minutes no thirty

minutes no three hours so you can have a booking at the pub for

two hours and forty minutes yes no now we are closing the pubs

at midnight so last drinks get on the beers but avoid crowds

From The Hummingbird Effect, 2023

Yes, I’m worried that some readers might close the book when they get to these (albeit very short!) sections, or throw it across the room. But when I look at these words now, typeset and in a book I can hold in my hands, I’m also so very glad I wrote them. When I look back at my journal or the messages from that time and feel a vertiginous suck-back to the time, I’m glad I recorded it. In the end, me - my family - were lucky. We did not lose what others lost. This is a small act of remembering. x

What I’m reading

Graft: motherhood, family and a year on the land - the new memoir by Maggie Mackeller (who also writes the excellent newsletter The Sit Spot). Such exquisite writing - like a meditation. Highly recommend.

Etta and the Octopus by the hugely talented children’s/MG and YA writer Zana Fraillon (illustrated by Andrew Joyner). Glorious new one for your younger MG readers.

Thanks, as always, for being here xx