A major recent revelation, thanks to the current local COVID-19 situation, was the power of the NSW Health name tag. In the past, I had taken it off from around my neck as soon as I stepped out of those glass doors at work. I hate having anything that attracts extra attention from strangers. But lately, given that we’re not supposed to leave our homes without an essential reason, I’ve left the lanyard on until I’ve pushed open my own front door. The benefits of this have been far greater than I had imagined. People who notice the tag treat me like a conversational, English-speaking human. Staff at my local supermarket no longer come up to me to ask if I’m lost*. Customer service people that I might interact with face-to-face no longer speak to me extra loudly and slowly. I’m frequently reminded of an incident during my undergrad years where a guy at uni said to me, “Oh, I didn’t expect that Aussie accent to come out of you!” I’m glad we have to wear masks in most places these days. When I do get comments like that, I need to use far less self control for my facial expression.

Another way that this pandemic has made me think about race (OK, if you read enough posts in this blog, you know that I think about it all the time, pandemic or not) is through the data entry work that I’ve been doing for the COVID-19 response. How it works is that new cases are interviewed through a standard questionnaire, and then many of the fields in the completed questionnaire are entered into digital forms to help our data teams analyse this information more easily. I’ve seen quite a number of entries in the “ethnicity” field of the initial questionnaire form that I’ve found somewhat problematic. Like the interviewers who write “no” in this field for people who are born in Australia and have Anglo-Saxon names. So they’re “not ethnic” because they’re the default? Also, there are lots of families where the parents and older children are designated “Syrian” or “Sudanese” … but the youngest kids, born in Australia, get to have “Australian.” It breaks my heart knowing that by that classification, I will never count as Australian, no matter what I do. I’m guessing that most people filling out the questionnaire would have barely spent more than a couple of seconds thinking about what to put in that field. But to some people reading the document later, it can feel like a monumental act of exclusion.

On a lighter note, my favourite entry for “symptom of COVID-19” in the data entry has been “Surprise at having COVID.” And one of my favourite incidents during the latest lockdown is somebody tipping off the police that one of our former prime ministers was having a chat in a public space without a mask on. He labelled those actions “un-Australian”. Apparently he also gets to decide whether somebody gets classified as Australian. I wonder how he would fill out those COVID-19 case questionnaires if he were working as public health staff.

That incident above happened near Manly Beach, a very well known part of Sydney that I’ve visited every once in a while. The last time I went was earlier this year, over the Easter long weekend, when we were still allowed everywhere in Sydney. On a public holiday like this, the place was pretty full of people. But that’s not unusual for Manly. A colonial businessman had started to develop this area as a tourist resort in the 1850s. Of course, this land originally belonged to the Gayamaygal people. But unfortunately, they were decimated by an outbreak of smallpox in 1789, leaving our businessman to plant his row of Norfolk pines along the foreshore, and to develop the ferry service linking Manly to the centre of Sydney.

One thing that I hadn’t done before, on my other visits to Manly Beach, had been to walk along the foreshore, past the ex-Prime Minister sighting spot, all the way to Shelly Beach. It’s tucked away well enough that I had never been aware of its existence until I looked at a map before going to Manly Beach this time. Its hidden, sheltered location is one of the reasons why it’s a great snorkelling and diving spot. There’s also lots of marine life under the surface, not to mention a submerged motorbike that has been there for about a couple of decades, at least. Nobody knows how it ended up there, but as you can imagine, there are a lot of theories and urban myths. Some even claim that there is a secret, second bike. Cue over-the-top suspenseful music.

I might be able to go back to the beach sooner than I had thought. They told us this week that we’d be set free in less than 2 weeks’ time. Just around Sydney, but there’s no shortage of beaches around here. Whether there would be any that are less crowded with appropriate physical distancing, though … that’s the thing that’s making me a bit apprehensive about heading straight for the Pacific when we’re allowed to. The great thing about the lockdown, at least, is that I haven’t had some of the slightly less pleasant interactions with strangers that I’ve had in “usual” life. Last week, I had my first racist call-out by a stranger since the beginning of this lockdown in June, I think (usually it happens about once every 2 months here in Sydney). It was a random guy on the escalator going in the opposite direction from mine. The words were, “Asian eyes!” … accompanied by that hand gesture near the eyes that I’m sure many of us are familiar with. It definitely wasn’t the worst that I’ve had, but I’m not looking forward to those starting up again in the coming weeks.

*Update: It happened again recently, since I wrote that paragraph. One of the staff members at my local supermarket approached me to ask if I knew what I was looking for. I looked down and realised that I had decided to wear my scarf long rather than looped around my neck, and it covered up my name tag.