‘Scott Morrison himself actually seems to have done more than any other Australian PM to undermine faith in parliamentary democracy.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP Labor ended almost nine years of conservative rule, its election a comprehensive repudiation of Scott Morrison’s “ bulldozer” style and sometimes tenuous relationship with truth. In May Anthony Albanese, parliamentary veteran and Labor true believer brought up by a single mother in inner Sydney public housing, became Australia’s 31st prime minister.
Then in 1978 Grease transformed Our Olivia, the ingenue, into the temptress, Sandra Dee, opposite John Travolta. Courtesy of her breezy pop hits and wholesome image (amid the louche menace of the Easybeats, Daddy Cool and the Masters Apprentices) she was an apparent innocent in a corruptive sea of potential moral danger for Australian youth – Melbourne’s Miss Goody Two-Shoes. She was lead vocalist of the Seekers at a time when the folk band from Oz was breaking international musical records unmet even by the Beatles and Rolling Stones.īritish-born Newton John, who died at 73, was readily claimed by Australia, where she grew up, for her appeal to a generation of parents wary of the devilish rock and pop culture of the late 60s and 70s. We will never find another songstress quite like Durham, who was 79, not least for a becoming modesty disproportionate to her enormous musical talent. Two much-loved Australian girls-next-door – Judith Durham and Olivia Newton-John – also died this year, both in August. He was already a fixture in the national heart when he played Shane, the Warnie impersonator who married Sharon Strzelecki in Kath and Kim.
Except he could do anything on the pitch and much else beyond it. Warne was the relatable sun-kissed and zinced blonde suburban boy (son, husband, dad, brother) next door, fond of a beer and a gasper, always earthily prosaic in taste and demeanour. Bradman.Īn inflatable Shane Warne during the men’s T20 World Cup match between Australia and New Zealand. He was memorialised in a fashion usually reserved for the long departed. Warnie, the everyman with a less than once-in-a-generation cricketing gift. In March the (not only cricketing) world grieved in disbelief the death of Shane Warne at 52. Mass displays of grief in 2022 were largely reserved for those touched by fame. As we, the mass vaccinated, get about our business, it also poses another question: how might history recall Covid’s dead and those who grieve them? If the global flu pandemic that struck Australia in early 1919 (eventually killing 62,000 from a population of about 5 million) is any template, the historiography will be thin.
It is deeply discomfiting to ponder what this exposes about human nature, the herd survival instinct and whether a similar death rate by most other means would be tolerated. A cruise ship with 800 cases docking in Sydney barely raises a public health eyebrow … the Ruby Princess is a distant memory. Isolation with the virus is effectively optional. It’s as if we can only focus on the road ahead and not on the continuing pain and loss. But time’s arrow has quickly realigned and travels now at Exocet speed everyone says 2022 has flown like no other year. It has been the year of invisible suffering.ĭuring lockdowns time lost dimension (like Dali’s clocks, I wrote). But the great post-reopening Omicron waves of January (a seven-day average of 92 daily deaths at its height) and July (83) have inured many Australians to inevitable mass (and mostly headline-unworthy) fatality.
This would have been of grave community concern during the 20 lockdowns, when just a few deaths were headline news and panic-inducing. In November more than 70 people a week were still dying of Covid. Central has been the harsh utilitarian acceptance of an alarming number of Covid-related deaths. The political and economic imperative to reopen in 2022 was always contingent on a profound psychological and emotional shift in our society. The year started with hours-long queues for Covid tests, and ended with testing, mask and isolation mandates gone, despite continuing deaths.
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