How history got me through lockdown
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to an event through the History Council of Victoria with a discussion panel about history as nourishment, consolation and guidance during the pandemic. It got me thinking about the way in which history has been all of these to me this year. Overwhelmingly, history has provided me with a very welcome and much needed sense of perspective. There was a feeling, very early on this year, that we were living through something big. In my lifetime, probably only the fall of the Iron Curtain and the September 11 terrorist attacks could compare. But while those events changed the global world order and had indirect impacts on things like the way that we fly, for example, they didn’t impact me, or many others, personally in the way the COVID pandemic has. Despite these impacts, the sense of perspective I was able to draw from history has been a source of comfort, as well as guidance throughout 2020.
To be clear from the get-go, this is not about toxic positivity or telling you to ‘buck up’ because it could be worse or someone else is worse off. I’ve seen friends struggle this year and not admit it because they didn’t think they had the right to feel sad, knowing that others had it worse. But there’s no denying, lockdown was tough. It was tough if you lost your job, owned a business, worked in a public-facing role or worked from home. It was tough if you lived alone, lived with housemates, with a partner, or with children. It was just tough. Regardless of your circumstances, you were allowed to find it tough.
At times, I found it hard too. I was furloughed from my job in the travel industry in March, and only worked part-time through most of the year. For a six-week period in August and September, I didn’t see a single person I knew in real life. It was lonely. I got bored. But I did find a sense of consolation and nourishment from the perspective that history gave me. It enabled me to place the pandemic, and 2020, in a much broader context. Seeing people panic-buying, and supermarket shelves bare and with limits on certain goods, made me wonder if this was what war-time rationing felt like. Seeing the queues out the door and around the corner at Centrelink gave me a knot in my stomach, but also made me wonder if this was how the beginning of the Great Depression felt. I knew it was a big deal, and felt that I should have been worried or stressed about it, but overwhelmingly my feeling was a sense of wonder — this was interesting! What a thing to be living through, or in the words of Hamilton (which also got me through lockdown), “look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”
Also interesting have been some of the social responses, especially during the second wave lockdown in Melbourne. How will we explain to future generations that the state paused everyday to watch a politician’s press conference, one of the highest rating programs some days. Or that a public health bureaucrat became the sex symbol of the year, with his face adorning coffee mugs and cushions. Or the way that all of Melbourne hung on whether the Premier would be wearing his North Face jacket that day or not. Did people response to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats in a similar way? How will future historians write about these reactions? Considering these questions and drawing parallels with previous events has helped me to think of the pandemic as a transient event. It too shall pass, in other words. It may be hard to see when you are in the thick of it, but it will end and will pass into history like other historic events have.
In finding the pandemic interesting, I acknowledge my privilege in being able to do so. The second wave in Melbourne was bad by Australian standards, but relatively under control by global standards, and being able to work from home meant that at no stage did I need to be seriously concerned for my life. I also did not have relatives in a criminally broken private aged care system to worry about. And although I was stood down from my job, I was privileged enough to live in a wealthy country that does not have an irrational fear of socialism, and in which the government rushed through a support package, meaning that while it was not easy financially, it was manageable. So I had the privilege of time and emotional space to be able to step back and make such reflections.
Working only 18 hours a week and being locked down at home for over 100 days also meant I had plenty of time to read, and I read a lot, often finding parallels between what I was reading and my present situation, which also helped to keep a sense of perspective about just how bad lockdown actually was. During the first lockdown I read Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah, about the Iran hostage crisis. Hostages who were held for 444 days. The second lockdown had me reading a compilation of children’s war diaries, collated by Zlata Filipovic, who wrote her own diary as a child during the siege of Sarajevo. A siege that lasted 1,425 days. Yes, one thousand. Both these events made our own 112-day lockdown seem eminently bearable. They also fostered a sense of gratitude. I had a constant supply of electricity. I didn’t have to risk snipers’ bullets to run to the water spring and carry my water home in containers. I could just turn on the tap. I didn’t have to burn the majority of my possessions for heating. All things to be grateful for. Again, a sense of perspective. It is in these ways that history has been a comfort and source of nourishment this year.
History has also been a form of guidance throughout 2020. Back in January, by coincidence, I read the book Pale Rider by Laura Spinney about the 1918 influenza pandemic, and early on I could see so many parallels, which perhaps contributed to my sense of history and interest, and as a result this year I have read, listened to, and watched so much COVID information that I’m waiting for my honorary epidemiology doctorate to arrive in the mail. And while COVID-19 is not a flu, its trajectory has been remarkably similar so far to the 1918 pandemic, as this article from Zach Hope, quoting historian Mary Sheehan’s excellent work shows. As does this article, quoting the main lesson from the past as being that “any measure before the pandemic that was described as exaggerated is later considered insufficient.” Being aware of this insight early on certainly helped me to expect these reactions and cut through some of the noise from certain media outlets and politicians. Noise which many in Melbourne found more harmful to their mental health than the pandemic or lockdown itself. The downside of this knowledge of history however has been that at times this year I have felt a bit like Cassandra — doomed to see the future but be disbelieved. It was hard to watch a desperate travel industry clinging to the hope of intra-European travel over the summer. That it might lead to a catastrophic second wave was sadly predictable, but history was doomed to repeat. The hope that at least Victoria’s government has learned from the past led me to ask a friend working in the government whether the public health team had an historian on their staff. Or did they want one? I was available after all, and refer you to the aforementioned forthcoming honorary doctorate.
To stray off topic slightly, and onto a political note, if you struggled with lockdown, sometimes seemingly arbitrary border closures, and being separated from family this year, and if the discussion of perspective has resonated with you, please spare a thought for the asylum seekers in this country, for some of whom these measures are their perpetual daily reality, with no end date. We did 112 days. Some of them have done seven years. With still no end in sight. An historic event such as COVID can lead to historic changes. I hope that greater empathy is one such change Australia experiences.
Finally, it has been a hard year for the humanities in Australia. So this is a shout out to all the historians out there. In a year in which supermarket workers were just as important as scientists, I hope we have learned that all work has value. History matters. It mattered to me this year. So if you are an historian, thank you. And if you are a teacher or a parent, please encourage your students and children to study history, despite the false narrative that arts degrees lead to poorer employment outcomes. Humanities not only has equal or greater employment outcomes to other degrees, it can provide useful guidance and critical thinking skills, as well as being a source of comfort in difficult times, teaching empathy, perspective and resilience. Skills that were needed in 2020, and which we are going to need in the future as we face the historic events and challenges to come.
