Vanessa, Duncan & Elliot (9) – Sydney

“I don’t know if I’ll miss anything about the current restrictions. Maybe in retrospect the whole isolation thing might be romanticised and we’ll tell tales of the days of toilet paper rations, slow internet and how we chatted with friends from open bedroom windows to them on the street below.

Award winning journalist, Kate Mellis caught up with Vanessa for an email interview.

I remember it feeling so surreal that a virus could halt the whole planet. At first I was reading everything that came my way and it felt overwhelming. About two weeks in, I decided not to follow any news feeds and just to hear the filtered information from Duncan, my husband, and to just keep to the safety guidelines of basically washing my hands a million times a day and staying home as much as possible. 

A month before the start of the COVID-19 “lockdown”, the storms hit Sydney (after the bushfires). A 50-year old gum tree was uprooted and fell onto our weatherboard rental house, smashing through the lounge room ceiling with such a loud pulverising noise, it felt like it wasn’t going to stop. We all briefly panicked and tensed up in preparation, then there was silence as the tree rested. Most of our belongings in the lounge room were unreachable, crushed or ruined by the rain.We stayed with friends and found a new place to live within a week. Friends helped us move, brought us food, booze and spare furniture. We were so appreciative of their support. 

My son, Elliot hasn’t asked any hard questions about what’s going on, that I can recall. He knows about the virus and watches abc kids shows, Behind the News, as it’s on his homeschooling timetable, but we don’t have a TV so he hasn’t been topped up with any other info. I am so vigilant about hand washing and social distancing that I thought it might make him a little anxious… but he mainly thinks about playing the online game, Roblox.

We keep forgetting to go outside and after about two days, we realise we need exercise so we do some dancing around the house. It usually consists of badly miming to songs and moving around in the style of an 1980s drama class run by a hippie.

The pandemic has taught me to be frugal. I’m not sure I’ll have the same drive to turn a tiny bit of leftover stew into a tiny pie, but it has definitely taught me to be less wasteful in terms of food. And toilet roll! 

When this is all over, I’m most looking forward to knowing my parents managed to dodge the virus. I’m so far away from the UK and sometimes I feel really, really far away.

It’s so great to hear that COVID-19 active cases are falling in Australia and some restrictions are lifting. I’m hesitant to rush to meet the new more relaxed guidelines as I’m comfortable being a temporary recluse and don’t want cases to rise, but I’m really looking forward to seeing friends and family again.”

Rosy, Tom, Oren (11), Denham (6), Nate (5) – Sydney

“Being with the kids all-day long has meant I’ve done more painting at night. One night, I picked a flower in the local street and sat up late painting it. It was a really huge, white, ghostly-looking, exotic flower. When I Googled it later, I found out it actually only flowers one night a year. Literally for one night only. So that brought joy in COVID-times, because I captured a really fleeting, beautiful thing.

Award winning journalist, Kate Mellis caught up with Rosy for an interview over the phone.

At the end of the first week of lockdowns, there was a feeling of anxiety hanging in the air. When I walked down the street, I felt like people were smiling and then averting their eyes, as though they were worried. If you’d have told me last year this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. It seems like the stuff of movies. A few months on, it feels like we’re coming out of this period, and there’s a lot more joy and trust back. 

My husband Tom and I came here to Australia from the UK going on 15-years ago. We don’t tend to have a lot of support with our family, there’s no grandparents or friends who take our children. So in terms of COVID-19 affecting that side of things, for us, it’s probably been minimal compared to other families. We’re a close family and we just hang out together. We’re a family of five in a two-bedder, so we’ve had to move around the furniture to make space for two offices, study stations for the kids and my art studio.

Having Tom and the children around constantly has been a really big change; not having any of those pockets of time, maybe half-an-hour here, half-an-hour there, where I’ve been on my own. I’ve got two part-time roles and Tom works full-time, so like most Australian families, we’re super busy. I guess it’s just been special in some ways, to simplify and know that we’re safe here together. Sydney is full-on; it’s so busy, you’re always racing, there’s so much traffic and all of that affects you. It’s such a joy to have peaceful roads. 

My kids make me laugh every day. It only happened once, but doing a live physical education session with fitness guru, Joe Wicks was really funny. All five-of-us in the lounge room one night at 7pm, the limited space and the silliness from the boys is unforgettable.

 I was concerned about the mental health of my youngest child, Nate when he started drawing pictures of people with a virus in their eyes. At some points he wouldn’t leave the house for three days at a time. I think some of that may have been him being a little bit worried about the virus and not being able to verbalize that anxiety to us clearly.

My deepest fear right now would be not being able to get back home to see my family again. I haven’t been home to the UK for a very long time. We were supposed to go back this May and then everything was cancelled. It was going to be a big family reunion; I’ve got six brothers and sisters, and we were all going to see each other for my mum’s 75th birthday. I’ve been really worried about mum because she’s the primary carer for my sister who has special needs. I’ve just been concerned about her self-isolating and whether she can cope with that. She takes everything in her stride and is very positive thinking; an absolutely amazing woman. 

 The pandemic has taught me that everything’s kind of interconnected and we’re all just so dependent on each other. It’s taught me we can still be connected even when we’re apart and that people can be adaptable. When this is all over, I just want to be able to chill out on the beach again, like we do as a family, without having to rush in and out of the water. And just being relaxed in the world again.”

Lyn, Anthony, Nicholas, Emily & Aria (dog) -Sydney

“Kids my age are generally not interested in world affairs. I’m in grade three and it’s probably the first time ever, other than around World Wars and the bubonic plague, that kids and adults in every single country of the world have heard about the same life threatening world affair, Coronavirus.

Award winning journalist, Kate Mellis caught up with Lyn and Anthony over the phone and email.

Anthony (9), Lyn’s son

“Kids my age are generally not interested in world affairs. I’m in grade three and it’s probably the first time ever, other than around World Wars and the bubonic plague, that kids and adults in every single country of the world have heard about the same life threatening world affair, Coronavirus.

Even my four-year-old little sister knows how this ‘sickness’ has changed her way of life dramatically. There are no visits to the beach, no sports, no friends coming over for playdates. We are not even allowed to see other members of our family.

I have noticed lots of new changes around the house, such as, the way mum has been cooking new things all the time and the fact that we are mostly doing things together, a lot more than we used to, because we are all here at the same time. We have been going on more bush walks and playing games. I’ve been playing a lot of basketball with mum and have gotten so much better.

A few of the other things I’ve been doing are; practising my saxophone, learning how to play “Havana,”  doing a lot of cross country training on the treadmill every day; having Facetime and Zoom playdates, card games and Scrabble. We just got our new dog, Aria so we have a lot of time to bond with her. 

Currently, my seven-year-old brother, my little sister and my crazy three-year-old Samoyed are wildly doing circuits around the lounge room. The noise is deafening. Fun! FUN! I can’t wait to join them. My life under lockdown is pretty darn GOOD!”

Lyn, mother-of-three

“We were all in shock for the first two weeks. I’d sit up at night and watch the American and British news and it was just shock. But once we got over the shock of it, we realized it was quite an opportunity to have some fun.

We’d just gotten a dog, Aria, before all of this happened, so she’s been a wealth of entertainment and happiness. We let her off the leash for the first time to play with other dogs this week. Aria’s never been off a leash in her life and she was like a ballerina. She was pirouetting on her back legs, doing 20 sideways somersaults in a row. It was a moment of joy that made the kids and I fall about laughing. 

Life’s not as busy, everybody’s happy and healthy and everything’s just a team environment. Anthony said to me, “mum your cooking is so much better now.” And I explained, ‘Anthony, it’s not that my cooking wasn’t great before but I just have more time to do things’ and I do it with the kids. So now the kids cook dinner. Emily has become a whizz at banana bread.

Emily had her birthday in isolation. She had 200 balloons blown up in the lounge room and streamers everywhere and Coco Pops for breakfast which was a mega hit and we just played games of her choosing all day. The kids really miss their friends and that interaction. 

Often you think you can put things over the top of kids’ heads and they don’t pick up on it, but Anthony has really picked up on the effect of social distancing on others. He’s noticed the effect on his little sister, Emily because she only just started preschool this year. She’d had her first play dates with friends she’d met and that was really important to her because she hadn’t been to day care. He picked up on that. It’s interesting that he’s put a positive spin on it all. He can see the good and bad parts and the compensating factors. 

The hardest question I’ve had to answer from my kids is “is it safe to go back to school?” because everybody has had to distance so much. They’ve been drilled about doing the right thing when they’re out and washing their hands and everything, so the idea of going back to school is just a bit scary, because they know it hasn’t gone away, they just know that it’s not as bad now. I reassured them by saying ‘I would never put you in a position of doing something that wasn’t safe.’

I actually had a Stockholm Syndrome moment the other day when they started to ease restrictions. I went, ‘oh no, but I like my life now.’ But that did pass fairly quickly when I thought, ‘yay, no more homeschooling.’ I even like that part because you get to know what the kids are doing, you get to help them, you get to see the little sparks light up when they learn something new. Their nanna has been helping them on FaceTime which has been really nice for her because she’s alone.

There’s someone who has been going around my local area writing in beautiful handwriting, “see the space in between as a gift of life and love.” The pandemic has taught me to keep reminding myself not to get caught up in the issues of the P&C or the issues of going back to work or the busyness of this or that. 

When this is all over I’m looking forward to going out to a very crowded bar in the city. The solitude is lovely and calming but it’s also good to have that other side of life as well.”

Bronwen, 41 & Archie 8, Sydney

“It’s made me realize how important it is to maintain friendships and really put in that effort because they’re the things that give your life meaning when you’re stuck in a box”.

Award winning journalist, Kate Mellis caught up with Bronwen for an over the phone interview.

I’m a single mum and until recently, my son, Archie and I had been living with my parents and my younger brother, all of us in the house together. About a week before Covid hit it big in Sydney, we moved into a little two bedroom apartment above a shop. It’s quite fortuitous because I’m a nurse, and very early on, I had flu-like symptoms and got sent home from work and had to isolate, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was living with my mum, dad, brother and son. I was self-isolating in my little apartment and my parents looked after my son for a couple of days. Luckily my test came back negative. There was one day, after three days of isolation, when a good friend just rang for no particular reason and we must have chatted for about an hour, which is unusual for me. I remember getting off the phone, and just feeling so grateful for the friendship and that they thought to call.

I work full-time with cancer patients. They have decided that anyone who’s not specifically frontline should work from home. In the event of exposure at work, those people that work from home can come in and cover nurses who have been exposed or can’t come into work because they’re unwell. It’s not really the type of job you can do from home because so much of what we do is hands-on and you need your eyes to assess the patients. I have a different job at the moment, it’s coordinating patient treatment, so I’ve been working from home for the last two or three weeks, which has been a really unusual situation. I’m probably doing about 75 percent of my job realistically, and you end up relying on the registered nurses who are there on the floor, to sort of pick up the pieces of the things I can’t do. It’s frustrating, because as a nurse so much of what we do, is face-to-face with patients, and particularly older patients, wouldn’t be used to everything being online and over the phone.

I still drop Archie to mum and dad’s house every day because obviously when school was on he was doing the school work and now it’s the holidays, he just goes and hangs out with them and I pick him up at the end of the day. He is, for the first time ever, missing school. And I thought I’d never hear him say that. He has days where he is much more frustrated than he normally would be. It’s a lot more unlimited screen time, which in some ways, he’s enjoying. He’s quite an active child and soccer season was just about to start, so he’s really missing the interaction of the sport. We are lucky, I guess, that we live in a time where kids can connect using Zoom and FaceTime and all those sorts of things, so Archie’s quite happy that he’s allowed to get online and speak to his friends for a lot longer. He’s actually very tactile. He’s always the one hugging all his buddies, so I guess he’s finding it pretty weird not to have that contact.

Using chalk to draw rainbows seems to be one of those things a lot of people are doing, trying to brighten things up outside their homes as much as possible. People in our area are also putting bears in the window so that young children can walk around doing bear hunts.

This pandemic is a great leveller in some ways, when you see that one thing can hit so many people around the world and it doesn’t distinguish between the types of people. It makes you realize the importance of connection with friends and family over everything. You wonder how we come out of it. What do things look like when everyone decides to go out? What’s left for individuals who have lost their jobs or small businesses? It’s hard to imagine, when I have a job, what it must be like to suddenly lose a job. That’s the devastation I don’t know how, as a community, we come back from.

When this is all over, I’m looking forward to things like going to watch my son play a game of soccer. Things like that seem like a real treat now. And just not everybody being frightened all the time. Hopefully life goes back to normal and we can just value any lessons that we’ve managed to learn from it. The best case scenario would be that the majority of us come out of this ok and we value friendship and humanity a little bit more, and not so much the material things.”

I had the pleasure of shooting my first newborn twins. I’ve never been that close to newborn twins so I was very excited! Twins are magical. They were constantly touching each other and entwining their limbs around one another and I couldn’t help but think how lucky they are to come into the world together. I really got to witness first hand why people say twins are so closely bonded. So cool.

The most beautiful home, the most beautiful light, the cutest little button. Enjoy.

Lara is one of my oldest and dearest friends. It’s a past life thing. She is one of the most pure hearted, generous, selfless souls I have ever had the pleasure of knowing and It was an honour to capture her beautiful family. Her eldest boy was just getting over an illness and he was out of sorts. We stopped, we started, we almost postponed the shoot for another day…and then magic happened. I was so glad we stuck it out. You can feel the love and joy between them when you look at the photos and that’s the gold. That’s the good stuff. That’s what I do this for. Enjoy.

I love taking photos of six month old bubs, they are so expressive and full of joy. He had been up for two hours the night before and we had to wake him from his nap when i got there. Regardless, he was such a trooper. Enjoy this beautiful, light filled shoot with the gorgeous lady in red, Emma, her lovely hubby Andy and their adorable baby boy, Finn.

From the moment I walked into their house I felt like we were old friends. Mum was in a t-shirt and undies and so comfortable in her own skin that she didn’t give a rats ass! I knew we were going to get along just fine. One of the best parts of my job is hanging out with cool people and getting a glimpse into their lives, it’s very intimate and such a privilege. I had so much fun shooting their beautiful and calm little boy. He was such a dream and so well behaved that his parents were wondering if he was just putting on a show for me. Lucky me!