COVID-19 Diaries: Sydney International Airport

Images of Sydney International Airport terminal, which, despite a trickle of incoming and outgoing flights, remains otherwise deserted due to the closing of borders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Property Crash and Tax Cuts

A mask-wearing couple walk past a vacant shopfront offering 3 months free rent as an incentive for prospective tenants.

A remanent sign, from the height of lockdown, in the window of a cafe gone bust.

With businesses being driven to the wall as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial properties around the world are seeing record vacancies. Residential properties, super funds, small businesses and workers, in particular, are feeling the knock-on effects of this downturn.

Today, in an attempt to stimulate the economy, the Australian government handed down what is generally seen as a business-focussed budget. Tax cuts are a central pillar of the budget, most of which will be directed towards people earning above $100,000. The budget will see the largest deficit recorded in history and hinges on a vaccine being developed and rolled out before July next year.

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COVID-19 Diaries: A Game of Chess

A man wears a protective mask and gloves while playing a game of chess in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

Today marked the second consecutive days of zero community transmission in NSW. As a result, South Australia has opened up its border with NSW, without quarantine restrictions.

While cases of COVID-19 have been falling across Australia, so have testing rates, suggesting that the infection numbers may be misleading and that the virus is still spreading in the community undetected.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Central Station Pop Up Testing Centre

A pop-up COVID-19 testing centre has been set up in one of the vacant shops at Central Station on Eddie Avenue.

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COVID-19 Diaries: The Bubble Generation

A masked couple push their baby in a pram with a protective sealed covering through the streets of Sydney.

While much attention has focussed on the immediate devastation amongst the elderly, the long term effects of COVID-19 on children and young people have yet to be fully understood.

But emerging research suggests those impacts will be physiological, psychological, economic and social. Factors such as stress, inactivity and isolation may negatively impact the development of a generation of children currently growing up under the coronavirus.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Sydney CBD Cluster

There were 10 new cases of COVID-19 recorded in NSW today, 4 of those related to the CBD cluster, bringing that total to 64. 61 of those cases are related to the City Tattersalls Club gym cluster.

In total, there are almost 4,000 cases of COVID-19 cases in NSW.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Past Present

Masked commuters in the CBD pass by hoardings displaying photos of Sydney from around the time of the city’s last pandemic - the so-called Spanish Flu - more than 100 years ago. It is estimated that over 15,000 died from that virus and possibly as many as two million Australians were infected. The total population of Australia in 1918 was 5 million.

The current toll for the COVID-19 virus in Australia is 737 deaths and 26,136 infections.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Mask Wearing on City Buses

Photographs at peak hour at Wynyard Station in Sydney’s CBD where mask wearing commuters disembark from morning buses from the North Shore.

The NSW government is currently considering mandatory mask wearing on public transport as the bus drivers agreed to back down from a threatened strike last week due to workplace health and social distancing concerns on crowded buses.

Several clusters of the COVID-19 virus have been linked to city buses in the last few days.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Eyes Without Faces

More and more pressure is being applied on the NSW Government to make face masks mandatory in certain public spaces, such as on public transport. In the meantime, more and more people are taking it upon themselves to ‘mask up’ when out and about.

These photographs of shoppers, office workers and commuters were taken in Sydney’s CBD against the growing number of black hoardings which have sprung up around the city, where prominent retail shops once stood, now closed down and boarded up due to the economic downturn.

While photographing these images, I wondered about the thousands of deeply personal stories from behind the masks - these eyes without faces - that hurriedly passed me by; stories of anguish, strained love and unrelenting anxiety simultaneously suppressed and brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’

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COVID-19 Diaries: Graham

Graham wears a medical mask as he busks outside a supermarket in Potts Point, one of Sydney’s COVID-19 ‘hotspots’.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Outbreak at Catholic Girls School

Two school girls from St. Vincents College emerge from Kings Cross Station yesterday, a day before a COVID-19 case was detected at the school. Today, the school was closed down for cleaning.

That brings the outbreak number in Potts Point to four (Thai Rock, The Apollo, The Cruising Yacht Club of Australia and now St. Vincents College), further entrenching the area as one of the hotspots of note in NSW.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Kings Cross Testing Centre

A masked woman walks her dog past a COVID-19 testing centre in the heart of Kings Cross, as health care workers look on.

Potts Point and Kings Cross is a coronavirus 'hotspot' in NSW, with several outbreaks in the area.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Return to the Streets

A woman wearing a face mask walks past a homeless person outside an upmarket department store on Elizabeth Street in the fashionable end of Sydney’s CBD.

During the initial COVID-19 lockdown of Sydney in March, many homeless people were given temporary accomodation in low budget hotels around the city. Since then, however, more and more homeless have been seen back out on the streets, especially in the last few weeks. With fears that a second wave of the pandemic is just around the corner, a continuing economic downturn may see even more people struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Forecasts for unemployment, for instance, have now been revised up to 11% by Christmas, with an effective rate of 13% and may blow out even further in case of a second wave in NSW. Meanwhile the ‘mutual obligation’ requirements have been reimposed by Centrelink to everyone on Jobseeker payments, and the Jobseeker supplement reduced to $250 a fortnight by September. With small businesses being driven to the wall by the pandemic and the number of positions vacant slashed, these moves have been seen as punitive, ‘offensive’ and ‘dumb’. The Unemployed Workers Union is encouraging those on the dole to ‘strike’.

Part of an ongoing series ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Protest at the ABC

Masked Falun Gong members demonstrate outside the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) after the media outlet’s investigative report on the inner workings of the reclusive group and its leader.

The demonstrators have been staging a daily vigil protest since the broadcast of the programme last week. Mask wearing and social distancing have been observed during the protest.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Eastern Suburbs Outbreak in Sydney

Photographs from around the Potts Point COVID-19 outbreak area.

A pop up testing clinic has been set up in Rushcutters Bay, just up the road from the prestigious Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, where a case of the virus was reported last week. The Apollo restaurant, which was deep-cleaned on Friday, along with the Thai Rock restaurant, have also both been centres of outbreaks.

How these COVID clusters in Sydney’s wealthy, mostly white eastern suburbs have been treated by authorities and the mainstream media stands in stark contrast to similar outbreaks in Sydney’s south west, or in Victoria’s public housing estates, where police descended and locked down the overwhelmingly poor, multicultural community overnight.

Community sports, where teams of up to 20 (40 on a field in close contact at once) also stands in contrast to the recent Black Lives Matter protest of around 50 people at the Domain, which was shutdown by around 500 police. Meanwhile, crowds of up to 10,000 are currently allowed at large commercial sporting events.

As the number of cases of COVID-19 continues to rise in NSW, more and more people are beginning at wear masks, as was evidenced today around the eastern suburbs and the Sydney Opera House.

All this, while Victoria is due to go into Stage 4 lockdown on Wednesday.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Deep Clean at The Apollo

A special team of hygiene workers deep clean The Apollo restaurant in Potts Point, after COVID-19 cases were linked to the well-known eatery earlier this week.

While record coronavirus cases were detected in Victoria today, new outbreaks around Sydney signalled a growing unease about the prospect of a second wave in Australia’s largest city.

Four cases have been linked to The Apollo and eleven to the inner eastern suburb of Potts Point.

As of today, there is a total of 16,303 active cases of COVID-19 in Australia with 189 deaths.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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COVID-19 Diaries: Community Sports

COVID-19 guidelines are posted up around the Waverly Oval in Bondi for a community Australian Rules football match, urging players and spectators to practice social distancing and register their attendance via a QR code.

While cases of COVID-19 continue to sprout up around Sydney, gatherings are still permitted in NSW, including at places of worship, shopping centres, restaurants, bars and sports events, albeit only under certain conditions.

This is in stark contrast to Victoria which is currently under Stage 3 lockdown.

Part of an ongoing series, ‘COVID-19 Diaries’.

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