It’s around 10am on Saturday 21 March when I drive into Robertson, the small New South Wales regional town I grew up in (population about 2,000). I expect it to be a ghost town. It’s never been what you might call a bustling metropolis, two hours’ drive from Sydney. It’s got the internet and 24-hour news too, so it’ll be scared of Covid-19 too – how can it not be?
The main street is packed with cars. People stand outside a local cafe with their takeaways, having animated Saturday morning catch-ups. All the shops are opened, with cars parked out front of them. Tourists are still taking pictures of the Big Potato, the town’s most famous landmark, and buying souvenirs to remember it by.
I’ve brought with me the terror of my city life: the play I had in rehearsal has been shut down and with it most of my income for the year, and working from home has been accompanied by ABC News 24 giving me the latest Covid-19 updates 24/7.
Like a lot of people my age, the terror I feel is mostly directed towards the fate of my baby-boomer parents – mostly my 67-year-old father. He’s the owner of an “essential service” – the Robertson Friendly Grocer. It’s a supermarket and bottle shop he built nearly 30 years ago and works in most days. He has also had chronic asthma his entire life, at least one bout of pneumonia I can remember and is frequently flattened by the ailments he gets via my four-year-old nephew’s daycare centre. He’s a prime candidate for a gruesome Covid-19 experience.
By that morning, Dad’s made some coronavirus-inspired rules in the shop. Toilet paper is a long ago memory, none being delivered in the near future. No one is allowed more than one carton of eggs, one bag of potatoes, one kilo of flour.
Staff are to clean common areas every half hour (fridge handles, counters etc), and wash their own hands every 15 minutes. There are plastic gloves available, but no one is really wearing them.
Will there be a coach of greedy city folk coming in to raid supplies from these country-folk?
The conversations I have that day with customers are mostly light-hearted, except for those who’ve been inconvenienced. No one is panic-buying, and if they think for a second their two blocks of chocolate could be seen as that, they apologise.
A woman of around 60 grumbles at me when I make conversation with her: “Shutting cafes down? What a bloody joke. They’re making too big a deal of all this, and at what cost?”
A local small businessman comes in at the end of his day, assuring me his sneezing and sniffing isn’t Covid-19. “They” (the government, I suspect) will have to forcibly shut him down, this whole thing is absurd, he tells me. “I had some people cancel a big order today because I wouldn’t bring it out to the car for them! They didn’t want to come in! Bloody ridiculous.”
Three times during my shift I feel a bit embarrassed about my choice to wear gloves, like I’m overreacting. A bloke I’ve known my whole life tells me: “They won’t make a difference,” laughing at this now city kid as he walks out the door with his packet of ciggies.
At 10am on Saturday, 28 March, things are different as I drive in for my second weekend working at the supermarket.
The crowds outside the cafe don’t exist. The cars parked up and down the main street have vanished.
My first encounter with anyone in the town is when I open the door to go into the supermarket, an ancient woman in a face mask who shouts at me for not being socially distant enough from her.
The shop itself has changed: Dad has had screens installed on both checkouts, like a bank, they have “Keep Smiling” on them, and four out of every five people who come through the register comment on how wonderful they are.
There are no comments about the gloves, but if perchance my gloved hand accidentally touches the bare hand of a customer, there’s a flinch and I immediately get hand sanitiser for the person. Not one person refuses it. People are scared. They apologise if they only have cash to pay for their goods.
Nearly every person leaves with a genuine exchange of well-wishes. Real well-wishes.
Where the weekend before only two customers all day had been in masks, nearly a third of people have them. Only one man tries to make fun of someone who has one on – he finds no friends to back him up. I’m asked on several occasions if I’ll be getting a mask.
Between 300 and 400 people come into that small regional supermarket each day, and the manager of the store tells me she’s worried: “What about us?” she asks. “We’re at the frontline too. Doctors and nurses get given all the gear they need, yet no one cares about us. We’ve had to find the protection gear ourselves and no one’s given us any guidance on how often to change it or what’s safe and what’s not.”
Zero coaches full of city folk wanting to raid our bleach, flour, potato and chickpea supplies. Only one out-of-towner asks for a single bunch of kale.
The Big Potato remains unphotographed; we don’t sell as much as a souvenir postcard in its honour.
• Melanie Tait is a playwright and executive producer of podcasts at Mamamia Women’s Network
