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  2021-09-10

  HIST30060 Group-chat shenanigans

  Lockdown shifted the nature of community dynamics in our local area. We live in a peri-urban region on the outskirts of the Yarra Ranges; as such, neighbouring properties are separated by large swathes of Australian bush. This can be isolating at times; it’s very different to suburban living. Our street (which spans about 7kms) and adjacent streets have a WhatsApp group chat named ‘Fireguard’, which allows residents to share information about fire safety, planned burn-offs and emergency warnings. However, during lockdown the chat was increasingly used for the purposes of socialisation. Suddenly, distant neighbours began sharing jokes and engaging in conversations about lockdown living, through the chat. The chat became a site of social interaction that the members of our area probably didn’t realise they needed, until they did. We eventually decided to create a separate chat for general/social purposes only, the title ‘WHICHBIN’ constituting a friendly inside joke about one particular chat member who never fails to ask, “which bin?” she needs to put out for collection each week.
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  2020-04-04

  HIST30060: Enthusiastic Journal Entry

  This is a photograph from my first journal entry after lockdown began. It shows what I think was a fairly common welcomed feeling to the lockdown, before we knew how serious things would get. I recall being excited to have some time to focus on writing and exercise without the distractions of work. How quickly those feelings changed...
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  2021-04-22

  HIST30060: Anti-Lockdown Pub Menu

  This screenshot of a pub's 'freedom menu' captures the way that people's opinions lockdown measures have been expressed in strange ways. It also highlights the unusual propensity for anti-lockdown opinions to elevate their struggle to that of great civil rights movements of history with their persistent use of terminology like segregation.
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  2021-10-11

  HIST30060: A Secondary Teacher's Chronicle

  This is an image of a week from my mother's chronicle. She is a secondary teacher in regional Victoria who primarily teaches Theatre Studies, Drama and English. During the time that the photograph was taken (October 2021), the school she is working at decided to stagger teaching different year levels to reduce the threat of a Covid-19 outbreak in the lead up to VCE exams. As highlighted in the chronicle in different colours, some classes would be taught in-person and others online in one day. As my family does not live in the same town that my mother teaches in, she would often have to stay at school the entire day regardless. Due to the nature of rapid changes in health information and additional directions from the school itself, every week in the chronicle looks very different to the next. The image shows an element of the chaos that is present in the everyday lives of individuals during covid and the ability for plans to rapidly change from day to day.