‘Sydney appeared in an amputated form’: the view from hotel quarantine

Journeying to Australia felt like travelling in time. Hurtling backwards along the coronavirus timeline. Revisiting the earlier phases of the global pandemic. Ordinarily it is jet lag, the upending of your body clock, that afflicts the incoming traveller. But now, as our plane came in to land in Sydney late one Friday night in August, we faced the additional problem of adjusting to Australian coronavirus time. After the 14-hour flight, my family was entering a country that had given itself long-haul COVID-19.

That time difference hit us straight away. With the nurses who met us off the flight decked out in full PPE and wielding thermometer guns. With the diggers wearing camouflage fatigues and rubber gloves who took care of our luggage. With the coach that ferried us from the airport to downtown Sydney, part of a convoy that included a police outrider at the front and a squad car bringing up the rear. In some aspects, it felt like a VIP welcome. But that acronym had taken on a new meaning. Every traveller, whether double-vaccinated or not, was treated as if they were potentially a very infected person.

For all the protocols and directives, for all the form-filling and QR codes, there was a measure of
mystery as we stepped aboard that coach. Nobody had told any of us where we were going. So the drive along the empty freeway, and the descent into the warren of tunnels beneath the CBD, turned into a guessing game as to where we would end up. Eventually, we pulled up outside a hotel near Darling Harbour, where the entrance was cordoned off with yellow barriers and the pavement was patrolled by a posse of NSW police officers, one for every disembarking passenger. Before stepping foot outside, a police sergeant read us what essentially amounted to the COVID act; in a flourish of officialdom, he even cited the legislation that dictated the terms of our stay. All of us knew, however, precisely what was coming next: 14 days of five-star detention.

The mood temporarily lightened at check-in when we asked offhandedly whether anyone had ever tried to make a run for it. Evidently there had been two escape attempts, one involving a man who came down to the lobby wearing a pair of boxing gloves. After threatening to punch the lights out of the military and police arrayed in front of him, he sprinted out onto Sussex Street. We never did discover what punishment was meted out, either from the officers who apprehended him within metres of the entrance, or the wife and children he had left behind upstairs.

For a fortnight we were sequestered from the very things that had drawn us back in the first place: family and friends, the outdoors, the Aussie way of life.

Then we were escorted to our quarantine quarters on the 26th floor, where a security guard patrolled the corridor to make sure we remained inside. A grey door was closed behind us, and the clock started ticking on our enforced isolation. For the next fortnight we were sequestered from the very things that had drawn us back to Australia in the first place: our family and friends, the outdoors, the surf, the Aussie way of life.

From our roofline vantage point, Sydney appeared before us in an amputated form. The stretches of water we could see were empty of boats. The office buildings opposite were devoid of workers. The motionless ferris wheel at Darling Harbour looked like a broken clock. The giant Australian flag fluttering high above Pyrmont Bridge was ripped and ragged – a symbol of a fraying nation buffeted by the viral storm.

Instantly, we were struck by how the view from afar had looked so different for so long. From our former home in New York, the one-time epicentre of the pandemic, the Lucky Country had seemed like some COVID Shangri-La. A Qantas ad made real. Throughout 2020, we envied the sight of open restaurants, crowded beaches and sports stadiums that looked on TV like some archival throwback, with their stands packed shoulder to shoulder with fans.

Australia even appeared to be taking victory laps. There was the night, for instance, that the musical Hamilton premiered to a packed auditorium in Sydney at a time when all the Broadway theatres along the Great White Way were dark. An irony now was to peer down at the closed theatre where that Hamilton curtain call had been met with such rapturous and almost self-congratulatory applause.

New York, throughout its months of lockdown and soaring infection rates, had suffered the downside of being the world’s most interconnected city, the crossroads of the world. Australia, by contrast, benefited from its geographic isolation, and the ease with which it could isolate itself from the rest of the planet. The tyranny of distance worked in the country’s favour.

But the corollary was that Australia succumbed to the tyranny of exclusion and entrapment. Tens of thousands of expat Australians were stranded abroad, a diaspora detached from its homeland. Millions more were prohibited from leaving these shores. Major cities, like Perth, went into snap lockdowns after reporting fewer coronavirus cases than our Brooklyn apartment building. Yet despite all this, there seemed to be no urgency in rolling out the vaccines, the indispensable key to unlocking the country that Australian leaders were slow to get their hands on.

So in its quest to remain a COVID-zero nation, the Lucky Country took on the tagline of the Hermit Kingdom. Yet as the United States discovered after the attacks of September 11, 2001, an understandable urge to protect and preserve something precious can end up inflicting national self-harm.

The closed confines of quarantine seemed like an apt place in which to reflect on Fortress Australia, and the underlying conditions that COVID had brought to the fore. The poison of state rivalries. The fragility of federation. The fixation with border security. The succour of isolationism. The short-termism of politics. When the borders finally open, there is much nation-building to be done.

Thankfully, our days in quarantine passed quickly; time collapsing in on itself has become a feature of this pandemic. My wife and I worked: Zoom, after all, can transform everywhere into an office space. I hired an exercise bike from a TV cameraman who now runs a lucrative sideline encouraging those held captive to participate in what he calls the Tour de Quarantine (he dropped off the bike early one Saturday morning, while on his way to film an anti-lockdown protest in Sydney’s CBD).

We homeschooled the kids, and tried to accelerate their Australian reassimilation by showing them the classics: The Castle and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Care packages from friends doubled as educational tools, packed as they were with lamingtons, Tim Tams and Milo. A teachable moment came when my 10-year-old son set about the Milo tin with a can-opener (to my wife’s horror, he had pulled it from the fridge).

Each afternoon, as dusk faded into night, we savoured the blazing sunsets over the Blue Mountains, which looked like the closing frames from some Hollywood biblical epic. We even managed to order in from our favourite Sydney restaurant, another reminder that quarantine was very much in the category of a first-world problem.

It was only in the final days that time slowed down. As the finish line got closer, it seemed further away. Then, in those final hours, came a quintessentially Australian twist. Medically, we were given the all-clear to go: news imparted by a doctor, police officer and member of the Australian Defence Force who turned up on our doorstep with certificates attesting to our clean bill of health. But even though we weren’t given any more check-ups – by now we had each been given three PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests – we were barred from leaving for a further 24 hours.

It is precisely this authoritarian bent – in a country that prefers to promote the myth that it is anti-authoritarian – that has brought on such an acid shower of criticism from overseas. “Don’t Australia my America”, tweeted Donald Trump jnr during our final hours of quarantine. “Australia traded away too much liberty,” read the headline in the liberal-minded The Atlantic magazine. The 2020 global exemplar had turned into the 2021 case study of pandemic paralysis.

But it is also worth remembering that these stones were hurled from a house of shattered glass. Though many of the Australian lockdown rules have seemed like bureaucratic overkill, and COVID zero always looked unsustainable as a long-term proposition, Australia has not become America.

And even though travelling here did feel regressive, we were not transported all the way back to the darkest days of the US pandemic. In our Sydney hotel room we were not kept awake at night by the ceaseless din of ambulance sirens, our experience in Brooklyn in the springtime of 2020. Nor have we seen refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals, or witnessed the medievalism of bodies being buried in mass graves.

Finally Freedom Day came and, late on a Friday afternoon, we were permitted to leave the hotel. In glorious sunshine, we drove through the deserted CBD, crossed over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and headed out towards the ocean. The portcullis had been lifted on Fortress Australia. Now it was time to enjoy the moat.

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