Wednesday 25th March

I never thought I would be looking forward to my academic engagements, and it’s only been 3 months since I officially handed in my thesis.  Given my chosen absence from the school space owing to needing a break from it all, I am excited to have some ‘work’ to engage with since I can’t seem to see to finishing my thesis, let alone starting work on publishing it or other articles at this point.  It all seems too new, too raw and maybe I took too long a break from my brain to expect it to kick back in, or maybe I'm just playing at academia anyways. 

Tomorrow we have our much-loved reading group, which will take place via zoom, and the start of our postgraduate seminar program, which ironically, will probably get more attention digitally than it did as a front-up event during normal times.  We will all be in the same boat, craving engagement, and wanting to support each other as we all know, working on a PhD is isolating at the best of times, let alone when you can’t go to school, or the library, or meet n have coffee to check in with each other.  I bumped into two of the post grads at the park last week walking their dogs and asked how they were doing with the transition to working from home.  Like everyone they have to adjust their schedule, and are limited by not being able to do research in the archives, but there’s always writing, and always more reading one can do and it might be an uncomfortable, but valuable period in one’s candidature to be forced to write and just keep moving forward with one’s own work, irrespective of the situation outside.   

My mind goes once again to wartime, an increasingly apt historical comparison it seems as this pandemic goes on, and I think about all of the major works and significant discoveries that happened during periods of stress.  Of course, the ones that immediately spring to mind such as Oppenheimer’s discovery of the nuclear atom and the development of penicillin came out of necessity, and were well funded campaigns with an ulterior motive, but I wonder at all those thinkers who hunkered down, with no internet or access to resources, and just used the dark time to ponder, to create, to imagine.  The music must have had some kind of developmental renaissance, as what else is there to do?  I’ve watched as all my struggling artists and musician friends are trying to continue to sell their wares online, and it’s an interesting time to see how people do spend their money because there are a lot of people on salary who have disposable incomes.  There’s no consumerism, apparently the company that fared the worst in stock trading the other day was AfterPay as the ass fell out of the online purchasing world overnight.  Fewer deliveries, more focus on the local.  Hopefully this translates into people putting their money into small Australian businesses, operators and arts.   
Katharine Murphy wrote an impassioned article for the Guardian yesterday that talked about Australia finally looking inwards and stopping all the global game playing it had been engaged with for generations, from England, to America and beyond.  To look around, instead of across the seas, to see firsthand the repercussions of moving our manufacturing overseas and outsourcing our businesses to international conglomerates.  Is this crisis going to bring about a resurgence of nationalism, but framed within a globalist discourse?  I looked an domestic self-sufficiency in my thesis, with people reclaiming power from the government and companies during periods of stress, but much of the discussion I found in my research was focused on national self-sufficiency, of agriculture, of oil production, of industry.  This was the mantra for successive governments since Federation, how to protect the ship from sinking as we sat precariously on the outer edge of civilization.  Now that edge may be our savior, as New Zealand is pointing us too.  We have enough food, and we have water, and we have fuel.  Global trade will take such a big hit after this event, I wonder if it will inspire a re-localisation at a national, if not a domestic level. The iconic poster of How to Build Community seems even more apt now that we are realising how precarious our lives are if only dependent on relationships of commerce and trade, and not love and care.

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