She says she will never recover from the lockdown, but she has learned “we are strong, we move forward”. It was my medicine.” She now has a business offering a coffee ceremony for events. She coped by holding a daily traditional African coffee ceremony in the flat with her daughter – roasting the fragrant beans with cardamom and ginger, pouring “with honour and love”, focusing on the moment. Ruth Eyakem, who lives on the Flemington estate, describes the lockdown as undermining her belief it is possible to be accepted as Australian “They said my medicine would be brought to me by the department, that all my needs would be taken care of.” When she tried to leave the building, the police told her to go back. Ruth Eyakem, born in Ethiopia but resident of Australia for 28 years, had been planning to fill a prescription for anxiety medication. This despite, as Glass described it, many bureaucrats labouring “heroically into the winter nights”. People had asthma attacks without Ventolin, chest pains without blood pressure medication, mental health episodes without their pills. A week into the lockdown, there were still delays in the delivery of medication.
For the first few days even the delivery of basic food was imperfect. The government was suddenly responsible for provisioning a community the size of a town, vertically stacked. It was the young people of the community who, after initially facing bureaucratic defensiveness and hostility, ended up moving to the heart of the relief effort, helping organise deliveries of food and using their local knowledge, language and, most important, relationships of trust to mitigate the worst impacts of lockdown. Now a youth worker, he was heavily involved in the effort by local youth groups to organise mental health support and care packages for those forced into lockdown Nor Shanino grew up in the Flemington Towers. “And the state government was effectively saying: what have you been doing for 20 years?” He remembers a meeting where the managers of the housing estates were forced to reveal they had no idea who was living in the locked-down flats. Nor Shanino, raised in the flats, has become one of the community workers who serves as a conduit between government and residents.
The people were stronger than they knew.įor years the DHHS had outsourced almost every aspect of the management of the estates, from healthcare to cleaning. It was that public housing tenants were “vulnerable”, that they could not look after their own. But as well as the assumptions identified by Glass, there was another that was equally damaging in its own way. The state government meant to save lives. “It is unimaginable that such stereotypical assumptions, leading to the ‘theatre of policing’ that followed, would have accompanied the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in a luxury apartment block.” It was still there 10 days after this image was made The front entrance to the apartment complex at 130 Racecourse Road smeared with a handprint of an unknown substance. For years the DHHS had outsourced almost every aspect of the management of the estates, from healthcare to cleaning Instead, Glass wrote, “the evidence was the vast majority were law-abiding people, just like other Australians”. On the basis of other documents, Glass concluded the government had assumed the towers were “a hotbed of criminality and non-compliance and that the people could not be trusted, if warning was given, not to escape the lockdown”. Public health officials had expected to have 36 hours to prepare. Glass was refused access to the cabinet documents that might have explained the decision for immediate implementation. The state ombudsman, Deborah Glass, later found that the lockdown itself was justified on public health grounds, but the sudden implementation without warning was not, and caused fundamental breaches of human rights. The state’s pandemic plan did not mention public housing. The lockdown was spurred by a rising number of Covid cases in the towers, together with an awareness of the risks of the overcrowded living conditions. There were visitors who were not allowed to go home. Then they discovered they were not allowed to leave their flats – not to shop, not to collect children who were on play dates with friends. The residents thought there must have been a mass shooting.
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