On the eve of the Easter holiday I always feel as if the Australian tempo takes a welcome shift down a gear or two.
The year is just a quarter over. Already there is always an intense weariness in the air. This year, like the last, you can add to that a liberal dose of trepidation.
In these Covid times, despite Australia’s comparative global good management and fortune, anxiety is at an all-time high for those whose livelihoods – and lives – are on the brink due to dashed business opportunities and the stone-hearted withdrawal of short-term pandemic social security measures.
If you’re a religious person commemorating the resurrection this weekend, it is, perhaps, a good time to pray for those most affected. If, like me, your approach is more secular, it’s an opportune moment to be mindful of them, to check your privilege and perform an act of charity that might make a difference to some lives.
Easter arrives (in the continental south at any rate) at a time of gentle seasonal transition, when the nation seems in more of a mood to contemplate rather than outwardly, ostentatiously celebrate as it does around Christmas.
The contrast between this, my favourite, most languorous, time of year and the mad freneticism of the Australian Christmas countdown, could not be more pronounced.
Just thinking about those mad pre-Christmas weeks raises my heartbeat. That hectic time of deadline pressure before the country shuts ’til late January. The endless urgent personal and communal catch-ups and let-downs and negotiations. The rampant consumerism with its pressure to bestow and receive unwanted gifts that only add to landfill. Setting the perfect table and negotiating from July whose turn it is to host and remembering who can’t be sat with who and planning every detail of a menu more fit for ravenous huskies (who bakes a ham any other day of the year or actually likes hot turkey with sweet pink jelly?) than sweating, exhausted, half-inebriated antipodeans.
As the dark mornings lengthen and the birdsong begins ever later, as the harsh southern light softens and the treetops are burnished russet, as the moon waxes towards full, this always feels to me like a time of emotional passage too – a long weekend to pause and contemplate the road ahead.
The air is dry. The Whiteley-esque blue of our southern seas begin to darken a shade as the water cools and the azure of the summer sky subtly mellows.
It’s time to break out the jumper and tracky-dacks, to pull up the doona.
Guests may come and go with little expectation around Easter. It’s a time to be together, for sure, but perhaps without the urgency and freneticism and formality that Christmas brings. Wrapped gifts aren’t needed. Instead, maybe flowers or the last of the summer tomatoes from a friend’s garden.
Food is no-fuss and casual; slow cooking to match the contemplative emotional tenor and golden afternoons. No need to set the table. Sit where you like. Light the fire. Talk. And talk some more.
There is so much to say but mostly, I think, for me at any rate, to listen to as the nation gears down into an Easter like no other.
This year a volcano of gendered injury, abuse and oppression has erupted from the core of our polity. Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of Australians are about to be thrust back into extreme poverty. The voices of pain and anger have never been nationally louder.
So think. Pray. Listen. Act.
