Interviews with Australians
By Tessa Pang | Magazine | April 19, 2022
Cover Illustration: Woman with mask looking out the window. Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels
Magazine Reporter Tessa Pang talks to Australians who moved abroad during the pandemic to find out how attitudes toward COVID changed when moving from a country with extremely strict measures to a more relaxed one.
In PART 1 I wrote about my own experiences with the spread of COVID information and restrictions when moving from Australia to the Netherlands. This made me curious to know whether other Australians felt the same quick decline in anxiety. So I spoke to a few people who, like me, had moved mid-COVID to try to get to the bottom of this shift and why their attitudes towards COVID changed.
Tom moved from Australia to Israel for work in March 2021. Tom is from Sydney but was unfortunate enough to be in Melbourne for their 262-days-long (37 weeks!) lockdown in 2020. He remembered being glued to the morning press conferences.
“It felt like a very high stakes situation in Melbourne in 2020. Every day, watching the small incremental differences in cases really made you see the slippery slope that could be coming. Everyone was just holding out for any drop in the numbers.” Tom also spoke of the incredible sense of personal responsibility: “we very much had the mentality that any slip up would only end up in you spreading the virus. And that mentality was definitely driven by those daily press conferences.”
Justin moved from Melbourne to the Netherlands in July 2020 and echoed the same sentiments, not being able to tap out of watching the daily morning news: “the news definitely created a strong sense of anxiety, which manifested in people taking it upon themselves to not even see their loved ones. For example, my brothers’ girlfriends were even cautious of my brothers seeing our parents because they were worried about transmission.”
For Justin, the change in reporting style between Australia and the Netherlands – and the fact that he was plunged into a new unknown place – changed his attitude towards COVID.
“In the Netherlands, the reporting was nowhere near in [sic] the same level of detail – there was no breakdown of where the cases were. And coupled with the fact that I couldn’t speak Dutch, I didn’t know any of the cities they were referring to and was solely reading the Expat news allowed me to feel like I could stop engaging so much. I felt like I wasn’t gaining as much from it.”
Tom had a similar experience: “I had no idea what the restrictions were for ages. I can’t read Hebrew and I didn’t watch the news so I was reliant on others telling me what to do and following along. But it wasn’t so important because, at the time, Israel was one of the first countries to be trialing a post-vaccine society.”
Shardae moved back to New York after briefly returning to Australia mid-pandemic. She told me that in New York there was a similar level of COVID information presence as in Australia. “We had an app that would ping every time someone near you had COVID. But because it’s New York and everyone is on top of each other it would go off all the time.”
While she said that the prevalence of COVID information was about equal to that in Australia, the ramifications were far lower. “In Australia, if you got a notification that you’d come into contact with someone with COVID, you had to self-isolate and take a negative test. There was never that expectation in New York which meant finding out that someone in your area had COVID was never a big deal – it was more like, ok well what am I meant to do with this information. So we would just ignore it.”
Everyone I spoke to explained that the biggest change in their anxiety didn’t come from the difference in information provided, but from the difference in the attitude of the people and governments in the country they moved to.
Tom told me, “within a month COVID was pushed to the back of mind. People didn’t wear masks, I was never once asked to show my vaccine passport. And even when Delta and Omicron came, Israelis didn’t feel the personal need to self lockdown like parts of Australia did during Omicron in December 2021.”
“I’ve lived in the US for almost five years now, so I’ve kind of adapted to the American way of thinking,” Shardae noted. “In Australia, I felt so stressed out to the point that I would either just not go out, or not do the tracking because I was so scared of being contacted by the government. I never felt that kind of pressure in New York, it made the rules a lot easier to follow.”
“In Amsterdam, the rules were quite harsh, just as harsh in Melbourne – like curfew and limits on the number of people that could walk together,” Justin explained, “but the difference was they were never policed in the same way. In Melbourne, the police would be stationed at the shop and checking your IDs to make sure you were walking with someone from the same household. If you were even just sitting on a bench drinking a coffee you’d get a fine. But Amsterdam never had a police presence or police who were enforcing the rules as seriously as that.”
Tessa Pang is a student at the University of Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
