HIST30060: I read this quote during the first Victorian lockdown, and I completely resonated with it. The isolation of lockdown had somehow made the biggest event of my life, and possibly the century, feel repetitive, mundane and even boring. It was strange to me that I could accurately describe a crisis atmosphere as dreary, in a way I would never before have been able to understand.

Newsletter from Chabad Kingston & Moorabbin Shul to their community, providing details of synagogue events, during this time of lockdown. It includes information about connecting over the High Holy Days

HIST30060: The introduction of QR codes into our daily lives has been just one adjustment into our new COVID normal lives. Previous fears of data security has been exchanged for the chance to socialize and eat out. As the pandemic continued, our priorities changed, and our normal changed, however our need to connect and socialize did not.

HIST30060: The Richmond Tigers mean so much to my family, and this year, being able to turn on the TV and continue to watch the footy gave our week some sort of structure. What this object says about the pandemic is a testament to continuity: what continues and what stops during a pandemic is crucial to understanding what is important to our society.

Letter from the president of Caulfield Shule to the congregation, sent just after Shavuot, discussing the possibilities of opening up and people being able to attend services, but the need for caution in case there is a second wave of infections

St Kilda Hebrew Congregation provides an email update to their congregation, sharing a message from the Rabbi about lockdown, as well as information about observing yahrzeit and saying kaddish while locked down.

St Kilda Hebrew Congregation provided an email newsletter update, discussing Tisha B'Av, as well as other arrangements and events during Covid.

St Kilda Hebrew Congregation, in their newsletter of 2 October, provided congregants with a general update as well as information about arrangements for Sukkot

In this newsletter update, information is provided about online activities within the Congregation's community, including about a special event that took place that discussed mask-wearing for Covid-19, with Dr Norman Swan.

During lockdown Kehilat Nitzan ran synagogue services online, through youtube and zoom. They provided congregants with instructions about how to access these services in a kosher manner.

In August the Rabbinical Council of Victoria wrote to community members about the plans being made for the Yamim Noraim (High Holy Days), explaining the conversations that were happening with government as well as the launch of Project High Holy Days, to accomodate the community's needs.

The Rabbinical Council of Victoria, working with the Melbourne Beth Din, produced guidelines for Pesach during Covid-19. Information is provided on inviting guests, using Zoom for the seder, 'Reaching out to the Vulnerable,' and giving tzedakah

HIST30060 This photo was taken at a rest stop i stopped at when I drove from Melbourne to Wodonga to pick up my mum, during the start of our second quarantine (in July). My mum, who had spent the past year living in the South of France, had been completing her mandatory quarantine in a hotel in Sydney for the past two weeks, and I offered to drive up to pick her up. However, due to the reintroduction of restrictions and the border closure between Victoria and New South Wales, I was unable to drive all the way to Sydney. To make up for this, she took the train from Sydney to Wodonga, where I then picked her up. I was very concerned with my drive, as I was unsure with the new restrictions if I would be able to drive from Metro Melbourne to the border, however, as this fell under compassionate reasons, one of the 4 reasons you were able to travel under those restrictions, I was able to complete my journey, and reunite with my mum who I had not seen in over a year.

HIST30060 Despite the global pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement saw a resurgence after the murder of American George Floyd in May of this year. Protests were sparked all over the world, pushing for the action to end the systematic racism experienced by people of colour (POC) and indigenous people all around the globe. I took this screen recording on my phone when, on June 2nd of this year, people all over the world participated in what was called ‘Blackout Tuesday’, where they would post black squares to their instagram account in an effort to project the voices of those who experience the systematic racism. I follow many celebrities on instagram, which you can see in this video many participated in the movement. However, the effort was quickly criticised, as the masses of posts featuring the black square began to dominate the Black Lives Matter (BLM) hashtag on all social media, an important tool that had been used by many to organise and publicise protests all over the world. Instead of the intended goal of projecting black voices over their white counterparts, the black squares instead silenced the important information that was being spread through the hashtag, doing the opposite of the intended effect.

For a brief moment in May, lockdown was lifted across Victoria and synagogues could have small gatherings of people. Kehilat Nitzan released details of their protocols for attending services.

HIST30060 During this year, I was luck enough to still be able to work in my fast food job due to the JobKeeper program, which saw the government paying the wages of part time and full time staff, as well as certain casuals. I would work 2 to 3 shifts a week in the city, which allowed me time to get out of the house and socialise with my coworkers. Restrictions meant we did not receive many customers, with our main source of income coming from the delivery platforms my boss installed. Despite this work, it did not mean I was able to escape the boredom most faced during the prolonged periods of restrictions, as there is only so much cleaning you can do in the periods where we had no customers. To fill the time, I began recreating famous paintings I could find online in miniature form, using the materials I could find in store, such as white board markers and receipt paper. Pictured here is my attempt at recreating Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ (bottom left), the ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai (right), and Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ (top left).

HIST30060 Restrictions meant many food shops in the city, like the one I worked at, received barely any customers during the harshest periods of quarantine. The 5km rule meant not many people had access to our location, whilst most of our customers who usually worked in office jobs in the city were also tasked with working from home. Our main source of income became the multiple delivery platforms my boss installed in our store. To both fill the quieter periods in the store, and to show the customers who ordered via these delivery platforms how much their business meant, my boss tasked everyone with decorating Uber bags and writing nice messages to customers. In this photo, you can see a design my colleague drew on an Uber bag, which was later used to carry Gilbert’s food. This small act connected both customer and business and showed our appreciation for the customers support of our small business.

HIST30060 Despite quarantine restrictions, I was still able to work at my fast food job in the CBD. Pictured here is a pigeon who would come into our store looking for food in the quietest parts of the day, which were almost always due to the lack of people in the city. Whilst working in the city, I realised that most urban birds, including pigeons and seagulls, became very confident during the stricter quarantine periods. The lack of activity in the city meant they were not receiving the usual scraps they would receive from those travelling to and from their desk jobs. The birds became bold with their interactions with those who were coming to the city in order to gain the small amount of food they needed to survive. This small pigeon in our store is a good example of this. He would waltz in and munch on the oats that would land on our floor before we had time to clean them. Despite repeated attempts to shoo him outside, he would often walk around our floor before meandering outside again.

"Rabbinic Administrator of The Kashrut Authority, Rabbi Moshe D. Gutnick, advises the community that due to the urgent situation for so many in relation to the impact of the coronavirus, COVID-19, The Kashrut Authority is issuing a unique set of guidelines to assist with this difficult situation." They provide an outline of the new guidelines and a list of items that are Kosher for Passover, even if they do not have a hechsher, given the limits of the moment. They also provide guidelines for adequate Passover cleaning.

The Rabbinical Council of Victoria's Project High Holy Days organised an online Selichot gathering involving many congregations

For Rosh Hashanah 2020, Project High Holy Days coordinated with DHHS and the Police and organised for people to hear the shofar being blown on their street or outside their home on Second Day Rosh Hashanah. They put out a call for people to sign up to hear the shofar and then coordinated shofar blowers. As they explained: "Volunteer Shofar blowers have been allocated zones which comprise of a few streets (which they will walk up and down). In locations where Jewish population is more sparse and there were fewer volunteers available, the DHHS has created a protocol for creating shofar blowing central points. Like the home reservations, these points require registration and have specific time locations. Times of volunteers arriving in your area will be emailed to you (if you reserved). If you did not book a shofar blowing, please listen out for the shofar and come out to the street as the shofar blower will blow multiple times on each street."

I wrote this article in October 2020, 7 months after I was forced to return home early from my university exchange semester in Edinburgh. Shared with my friends on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the article put it into words thoughts and feelings that had been on my mind for the previous 7 months. In it, I tried to capture how my last few days in Edinburgh felt: the rapid pace of COVID closures, the sudden goodbyes, the panic about travel plans and illness. Writing the article was an enormously cathartic process, and helped me process the confusing mix of emotions that I'd felt since returning to Melbourne. It is, far and away, the most complete summary of my experience of the pandemic that I can offer.

On 19 June 2020 there was a Stand Up zoom event, streamed live to their Facebook page. This screenshot and Facebook link captures part of the day: "With Stand Up's CEO, Manager of Aboriginal Partnerships and a member of the Board, discussing life, social justice and everything in between. PS. Gideon (CEO) has been on zoom for 8 hours non-stop!"

New Israel Fund emailed their email list in order to wish them a shana tova, and to send details of an event for Yom Kippur, as well as general information about what the organisation had been doing

in April 2020, the Australian Jewish News profiled a number of Jewish organisations to show how they were adapting to Covid. Under the headline 'Thriving through the Covid-19 crisis', one of the organisations profiled was the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia (NCJWA)

The National Council of Jewish Women of Australia compiled and shared "24 personal stories from Australian Jewish Women About Covid-19 and High Holidays"

With the pandemic lockdown, Melton School moved to online classes for its adult education program

Stan Marks, who is 91 years old, reflects on living during the pandemic, and also shares a letter he wrote to share with the students in Year 12 at Brighton Grammar, his old school

With the Covid lockdown in Melbourne, the Jewish Museum of Australia had to close its doors to visitors. In response, they moved activities online, organising events to be held virtually. These events were shared with members of the Museum community through their email list.

HIST30060

HIST30060

HIST30060

HIST30060

HIST30060

2020 is a difficult year, especially for someone like me staying alone in foreign lands. What frustrated me was not only the difficulties in life, but also loneliness and lost. I have no roommate in Melbourne. Therefore, after the 5km travel ban was issued, I rarely contact with the outside world. Not only that, many of my friends choose to defer their studies and stayed in their mother country due to the plague so I gradually lost contact with them. In this case, speak to my classmates on the tutorial became almost the only way for me to communicate with the outside world. I am not ready to face this situation, and these sudden changes made me so depressed. Social distancing between men made me feel ignored and isolated, and I even considered about postponing my studies. Until a few days ago, I found some cards (as in the photo) from my apartment’s common zone. On the front page of the card there is ‘I’m here for you’, and residents could leave their contact information on the card to people who want to make new friends. I take one of the cards and left my message. Although I have not contacted that person so far, I can feel the kindness from strangers, and the support there makes me believe that everything will be fine. #HIST30060

Western Australia's "Hard Border" has prevented many people who live in the state from returning home. Australians wishing to enter the state must apply for travel approval called the “Good to Go process” with the police. Very few are permitted to enter, and those that do must also self-quarantine for 14 days.

HIST30060 The pandemic has brought together communities in a way that little else has. It is often during the worst times in history that people seek comfort and solidarity in each other, secure in the knowledge that every person is in the same boat as them. We have seen similar Spoonville’s pop up in different suburbs around Melbourne. I believe that their purpose is something for children to enjoy when going out on walks during the many months in lockdown. When I first saw the Spoonville’s being posted on social media, I thought that it was a cute and fun idea. It wasn’t until I saw them myself that I realised the impact of what those spoons represent. People took the time to make them, create the desire for more to be made and I am sure inspired joy in the young children of my community. In times when so much is uncertain, it is nice to walk by the spoons and see them still there, a representation of the heart of Laverton.

As part of RU OK? Day activities for staff in this challenging year, hospital teams were invited to submit a team photo on the internal social media network. The Palliative Care team responded with a compilation recreating famous art works. The Paul Getty Museum popularized the phenomenon of recreating famous art works with a handful of household items earlier in the year.

Like many hospitals, St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne has a network of tunnels connecting campus buildings. The tunnels are customarily unadorned and very utilitarian in nature. The hospital's Art Curator decided to brighten them up to provide some light and cheer to staff and patients during Melbourne's COVID first wave. She called on former artists-in-residence to create thank you posters and collaborated with other staff to create works for themed tunnel sections including "Poet's Corner", "Archives Alcove" and "Pets in Iso". A straight section of the tunnels was termed "Avenue of Honour" and bore individual thank yous acknowledging each hospital department. The entire project was called the "Tunnels of Love" and its headline image (pictured) was a heart collage the Art Curator devised from photographs of flowers and plants she had taken during garden walks. There has been lots of amazing feedback to the project. It has provided a boost to the spirits of many who transit through the tunnels on a daily basis and the installation continues to evolve.

I was on exchange in Edinburgh in the first half of 2020, and due to return to Melbourne at the end of June. As borders began to close and Australian government travel advice changed, it became apparent that I'd have to return home some months early. This text exchange with my mother is the first time I flagged my intention to leave early, and captures the rapid pace at which events and plans were changing. HIST30060

I was on exchange in Edinburgh in the first half of 2020, and was forced to return home early because of COVID-19. These messages show 3 of my friends announcing in a Facebook group chat that they were heading home to Austria, which came as a huge surprise to the rest of us in the group. This was a sad, confusing, disorienting moment, which these messages demonstrate. HIST30060

An interactive hypertext haggadah I wrote for my family’s Zoom seder in 2020. I used Twine, a popular open-source, interactive fiction tool, to write a choose-your-own-adventure haggadah. It was the first zoom-based seder I had ever attended, and I didn't know how long my family would tolerate technological difficulties and the often awkward, fragmented conversation that some Zoom conversations/events can descend into. (Let alone the near-impossibility of group singing via zoom). Apart from this, it’s fairly common in my family, as in many others, that parts of the seder are skipped over, or their inclusion is contested, and I thought that trying to conduct a seder via zoom would only make people more eager to get it over with and reach Shulchan Orech, i.e. the getting drunk/ shittalking part and then call it a night. Writing/Compiling a hypertext haggadah was my attempt to facilitate a more fluid seder, in which parts could easily be skipped over on the night, among other reasons. In practice in turned out to be a bit of a shemozzle, which is partly due to some technological illiteracy among the mishpachah, and also partly because my hypertext haggadah is a rabbit warren (over 5,000 words spread over over hundreds of individual pages joined by hyperlinks), and so moments of anarchy would often ensue when people strayed from the communal path (which I enjoyed tbh, but were clearly frustrating to my uncle, whose ideal seder is basically the Two-Minute Haggadah: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/03/the-two-minute-haggadah.html)

Experiencing coronavirus in the age of 24/7 news coverage, I imagine most people have become far more conscious of where they choose to get their news. I've been brought up an ABC @ 7 operator, and I count myself lucky. Throughout the storm of rating battles, exclusive reports and breaking news I have been confident that I could trust the ABC and my paper choice The Age. Trust might be naive but it seems like the only option. Every now and again I'll flick onto a commercial channel and find myself wondering, is this news? My mates have also become more conscious of their sources too, one of them got me onto 'Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty' on iView, making me even more skeptical about anything I read. I feel like the media almost have an almost more important responsibility to people than politicians. I wonder a lot, at the moment especially, whether news outlets are fulfilling their responsibility or is shock and clickbait bringing in the money that really talks.

A friend of mine had a rough week. She lives down the coast, well out of my 5km play pen (the distance we Melbournians can travel from home). The phone calls are fine, but can be draining and don't replace a supportive hug. Feeling a bit helpless as a friend, I put together an hour of music I thought she'd find comforting. Diversifying the kinds of connections we keep up has been relieving in that way. Low pressure interaction, much like spending time in person when it is relaxed, calm, and conversation will bounce off stimuli in the world, is hard to replicate digitally. I've really stepped up my playlist game these days. She loved it. HIST30060

An image from the BLM protest in Melbourne. A protest sparked by George Floyd's murder but rooted in issues in so-called Australia. Always was, always will be. The protest was a vindication for abolitionists. Several thousands of people congregating without a single case of transmission between protestors and all community-led, in spite of heavy police presence. Highly communicative organisers, quick-thinking marshals, and responsible demonstrators made it a powerful and safe day. It was deeply affirming to be surrounded by so many who see and are concerned about white supremacy in comparable ways to me, and also a time to listen to voices of the strong activists who ought to be centred in discussions around Aboriginal deaths in custody, decolonisation, and police/prison abolition. HIST30060

Text reads: WAGE SUBSIDY FOR ALL #NoWorkerLeftBehind #PutYourApronOut Trade unions were strong advocates for a more robust safety net for workers who had lost their jobs owing to the pandemic. The JobKeeper package left behind casual workers (like me) and workers on temporary visas who were already had the most insecure labour conditions. My union shifted online. We ran social media campaigns, online pickets, and a whole range of other digital actions. Unfortunately, this one didn't get up. LNP stuck to their guns of looking after wealthy, white folk. Typical... HIST30060

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced almost everyone to make decisions, some small and some drastic. The following is a reflection of how my studies as an international student at the University of Melbourne, Australia were affected by the pandemic. The date is 9 July 2020. Covid-19 cases have been on the rise in Melbourne in the past two weeks. This trend seems specific to Melbourne as the rest of Australia seems to have the situation under control. I receive an email from the University. The email announces that the studies for the second semester (July to November 2020) will take place entirely online. The majority of semester 1 (March to June) had also taken place online. But students were hopeful that a return to face-to-face teaching would be possible given the relatively low number of cases of Australia up to late June 2020 (when the second wave started). As an international student, I must make a choice. To stay in Melbourne or to fly home. I need to do so quickly, since incoming flights to Melbourne had already been suspended, and there is no guarantee that the same might not happen to outgoing flight. In my case, returning home seemed the obvious choice. I would rather have stayed in Melbourne (a city I love!), but alas at least to return means to be closer to friends and family during these times. I write this in October 2020, the semester is almost over, and the number of daily cases in Melbourne has now dropped significantly (to single digits), after months of strict measures. For much of the rest of the world however, there does not seem to be an end in sight. Submitted as part of the HIST30060 Making History subject at the University of Melbourne.

During Lockdown in the search for routine and some sort of normality, usually my weekdays finish with ABC News at 7pm followed by 8 out of 10 Cats does Countdown at 7:30. Being a news snob I have always watched ABC, but recently 8 out of 10 Cats has become a new daily routine that provides regular humour relief from a bleak day inside. Hosted by Jimmy Carr and filled with stupidity as well as 'play-at-home' Countdown gameshow rounds, I have really fallen in love with it. The show is reliable, positive and immature, three things that are hard to come by at the moment. Further to that a pipe dream of mine is to one day live in the UK, and with borders closing until the end of 2021 that feels like a very long pipe, but getting to watch it even now makes me feel like maybe I'll watch it with a cup of tea in London somewhere. This particular clip was one of the funnier things I've ever seen on TV, let alone on this show, and made a mediocre night watching TV a conversational piece about a carrot in a box.

Community is important to all, especially in these difficult times. For significant events and religious observances, we need to be inventive to stay connected. The Reform Jewish movement in Melbourne, has been broadcasting its services throughout the Victorian lockdowns, and this was especially so for the High Holidays, when thousands tuned into live streamed services.

A regular entrance to the hospital is closed and covered with posters with public health messages and information on access restrictions in response to Victoria's second wave of infections in July 2020.