Melbourne's 'woohoo' week

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This was published 3 years ago

Melbourne's 'woohoo' week

By Gay Alcorn

Friday, October 30

“Woohoo!” was our headline, and the exuberance seemed fitting. The announcement that finally, after 111 days of lockdown, Melburnians could emerge, blinking, into something resembling real life was wonderful.

There were cheers at schools as parents collected their children as the news came through. Some pubs held ribbon-cutting ceremonies on the dot of 11.59pm on Tuesday. A nurse and a doctor who had met at the Royal Melbourne Hospital at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis were able to go on their first date.

What was obvious about the jubilation was that it was the small things we missed the most. The once taken-for-granted things. It is glib to say the pandemic has made us reassess what’s important, but there’s some truth in it.

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It’s a digital world, but the inability to see those we love the most leaves an aching pain. How lovely it is to meet a friend for coffee or lunch or to go out just because you feel like it. I booked too late to get a haircut this week - my hair is lank and long - but somehow hairdressers reopening became a symbol of emergence from our enforced hibernation. We style our hair because we want to express ourselves as social creatures. We need connection with people, even if we once complained about how busy we were.

There are many challenges ahead, and we can’t underestimate them. Treasury figures estimate that Victoria's effective unemployment rate, which includes those on JobKeeper who are not working, is 14 per cent. Some small businesses will never reopen. Our arts community is resilient but decimated, our CBD struggling.

But there is hope and if we all do what we can to abide by the public health rules - social distancing, wearing our masks - we can avoid another large outbreak. With government support and business initiative our economy can recover, even if it will be different to what we knew before.

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I doubt that any of us who have been through this experience will forget it, but I have been thinking about what I want to remember most. I am lucky, mostly because I have a job and because I don't live alone, so I could share the lockdown with someone else. My adult daughter, too, kept her job, although I know many people either on JobSeeker or JobKeeker, and, like most of us, I have seen the stress in the eyes of local business owners as they try to hang on.

I want to remember that, despite the politics and the legitimate disagreements and errors, we have done something remarkable as a community. The Grattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett wrote that Victorians had a right to feel proud. “No other place in the world has tamed a second wave this large,” he wrote with Tom Crowley. “Few have even come close.”

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The Age will attempt to cover our challenges with rigour and curiosity. But this year has made me feel more than ever that The Age not just covers our community, but is part of our community. You will not agree with every opinion piece we publish, and you may groan over our angles or our priorities sometimes. But we are part of Victoria too, and we care about it.

There is, of course, a big news event brewing in the United States too and we’ll be blogging the final days of the presidential campaign and have live coverage of election day and its aftermath. If you missed our exclusive subscriber event with US correspondent Matthew Knott, senior writer Farrah Tomazin and former US correspondent Nick O’Malley, you can watch it here. Matthew has been writing a weekly newsletter on the race to the White House and will send out a special edition on Wednesday with what to watch for as the count begins. If you haven’t yet signed up you can do so here.

Note from the Editor

The Age's editor, Gay Alcorn, writes an exclusive newsletter for subscribers on the week's most important stories and issues. Sign up here to receive it every Friday.

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