Crowds thronged to Bondi Beach today, despite stay-at-home orders and in stark contrast to the deserted streets in south-west Sydney, the site of a heavy-handed crackdown by authorities earlier this week. Also startling was Bondi Beach’s virtually empty COVID-19 testing station, which drew a polar opposite scene to Tuesday’s kilometres-long queues at testing stations in Fairfield. It was truely a tale of two cities: one wealthy and mostly white, and on the other side of town, the other, far poorer and with a population that is culturally and linguistically diverse.
Police patrolled the esplanade at Bondi, but made no attempt to clear the area. Almost no-one was wearing a mask. A number of large bare-chested men, aggressively yelled out at this photographer demanding I leave the area, apparently aware the crowds might draw negative publicity under this state of lockdown. Their demands were not met.
As the NSW Premier came under increasing pressure over the state’s so-called ‘soft lockdown’ and lack of clarity of the public health orders, Victoria, by way of contrast, went into a snap hard lockdown, just 3 days after the first case of the Delta strain was detected when removalists from Sydney travelled to Melbourne.
Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.
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