Studio Life In Lockdown

Lockdown life in Melbourne, Australia goes on (for the sixth time!), due to a number of factors which, when all is said and done, could have been approached by all concerned with far more calmness and efficiency. For artists like myself, these periods of enforced isolation are as much a 'busman's holiday' as they are a chance to reflect (in our studios), upon the direction we want our art practices to go. I say many factors when in fact, there are only two main reasons why the rollout and acceptance of the three main vaccines in Australia has been a complete and utter shambles. It is, as it stands, a shambolic mess that has more recently bordered on farce.

The first reason lies solely with all councillors and politicians (on all sides of politics), who work in the many layers of government in Australia; from local, to state, to commonwealth, to federal, all of them have failed the Australian public with their inability to work together to solve this national problem. They bicker and squabble like children in a school playground, each of them laying blame upon anyone but them self for the shortage of vaccine that the vast majority of Australians are willing and happy to receive. While reminding us constantly that Covid 19 is a global pandemic, their approach to solving the problem if far from that: 'parochial' is a much better word to describe their efforts in ridding us of this contemporary plague.

The second reason is that there is, as in any western democracy, a percentage of people who refuse (for a multitude of reasons that range from "government conspiracy" to "it will kill me if I get it" to "no one's going to tell me what to do" to the thousands of morons on the internet pushing the most ridiculous theories around the efficacy of the three main vaccines, even though none of them, it appears, have little or no medical history, let alone made any form of study before publishing their tripe). As a consequence of this online misinformation, thousands of Australians have made every excuse under the sun as to why they will let no one stick a needle in their arm. These very same people are no doubt the same ones who complain that their lives have "changed beyond all recognition", but can't see it is they 9along with government incompetency), keep the rest of us in this stultifying isolation.

This sixth Victorian lockdown may come to an end soon, but I am not holding my breath. If you are a politician of any political persuasion, work with the opposition: please! If you haven't had the jab yet, bloody well get on with it: please!