就在三月底，有一条“澳洲公民和PR禁止出境，否则将面临重罚”的新闻，大意是，从3月25日中午12点起，所有澳洲公民和PR（除非豁免）禁止出境，无论是坐飞机还是坐船！此禁令暂定4周，届时会重新评估是否继续。违反者将会面临最高5年监禁或者高达63000澳币的巨额罚款！据说，这是澳洲政府为了遏制病毒的进一步传播而采取的更加严格的措施。
Rachel，一位在澳洲学习、工作、生活了十几年的小姐姐，用她的文字把日常见闻、所思所想呈现给我们，从日常买菜做饭、朋友聚会到工作方式等方方面面发生的变化，带给我们特殊时期澳洲生活的个人感受。PS，从标题大概可以看出，本文是Rachel写的第一篇，后续将会不定期更新（期待中……）。
Living in Sydney, the first time COVID-19 was reported in the main stream Australian media was in January, when WuHan was being shutdown, and the last international flight from WuHan was to Sydney. The Chinese community around me were getting nervous, as most of us have family and friends in China, and know how serious this virus must be for Wuhan, Hubei Province then the whole of China, to be shut down.
Australia among many other countries, stopped visa holders from China entering into Australia. For someone who has lived in Australia for over 20 years, this had little impact on people I know here. One of my colleagues who is Chinese Australian, was in Guangzhou for Chinese new year with her husband and 2 young kids. They made the swift decision to buy new air tickets for the family to cut the trip short and returned to Sydney. That was a wise decision, as most of the flights including their original one were cancelled right after they came back. We asked her to work from home and self isolate for 14 days before returning to the office.
From Jan, all the Asian restaurants start to suffer, as people worried about COVID-19 virus being brought in from China and avoid going to Asian restaurants. The suburb near where I live has a large Asian population, and is one of the largest shopping and dining precincts in Sydney. I went shopping there in early Feb, it was much quieter than usual, most of the restaurants have some kind of specials or discounts. It was sad, but my life was not really impacted. I continued to go to the office, continued to fly every week for work, continued to meet my friends, eating out, going to the beach and parks, although most of the our discussion is around COVID-19, it still felt a bit far away.
We watched the number of confirmed cases going up every day, I started to wear masks on international flights。 Still, life is normal。 Then in March, COVID-19 hit Europe, Italy first。 We have visitors from our UK office to Sydney almost every week, also have staff here who have planned to visit the UK office。 I became very concerned, urged the UK office to cancel or postpone their trip to Sydney, they thought my worry was unnecessary。 The confirmed cases and death toll kept increasing in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and then the UK。
The UK team cancelled their trip to Sydney the day before they were scheduled to fly out, we also cancelled our staff’s trip going to the UK。 In the office, we stopped hand shaking, stopped going for drinks on Friday night, and stopped all international and domestic travel。 We encouraged office based staff to work from home。 For the staff working in our factory in Melbourne, and the engineers working in the field, we provided masks and plastic gloves, as well as hand sanitizer。
Sanitizer, along with toilet paper, has become the hottest items to buy in Australia. I never understood why the toilet paper, apparently because of the size ( a pack is usually 10 or 12 rolls) it gives people sense of safety. Shopping for fresh vegetable meat became expensive for a couple of weeks as people panic buy, luckily most are now back to normal. The last 2 weeks of March, Australia government started implementing social distancing rules. The rules became more and more strict, and states start to close boarder to each other.
Then the government closed all the restaurants and cafes, limiting them to do take away and delivery only, closed all the gyms, closed all the beauty salons. But hairdresser are allowed to open, I guess having haircut and looking half decent is essential service. With all the forced shut down, people lost their jobs, the queue outside of Centrelink (welfare system) to register is massive, the Centrelink website crashed in one day. Now we face both a health crisis as well as an economic one. It started to impact the company I work for. About 6% of our customers are in the sector being shut down, our revenue dropped, our cash collection dropped. We started to review if we need to let some of our staff go. The situation was changing rapidly, the decision you made 24 hours ago is already out of date, we felt we were trying to keep up the pace with how fast the virus is spreading and impacting everyone’s life.
It’s now early April, I stay home every day, only go out for a walk every day, go to get grocery once a week. Sometimes ordered food on Uber eats, joined a number of Wechat groups who deliver different types of food. I haven’t ordered any, but many are ordering lobster, as lobster and other seafood price has dropped significantly since the export to China and other Asian countries dropped since January as well as with the restaurants shut down.
The COVID-19 curve in Australia is flattening, seeing early sign of benefit from the social distancing rules (the fine in NSW for being out without a valid reason is up to $11,000, other states similar some with imprisonment). There are more people wearing masks on the street or in the supermarket, Asian and non Asian. We know this is just the beginning. But looking at life going back to normal in China, there is hope.
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