Living there during the pandemic was like living in an inverse Truman Show where I was the only one who knew that the place wasn’t real. I had not realised just how much the prison colony mentality was still with them. The collective Stockholm syndrome which the population displayed was astounding, alienating, and deeply depressing. The callousness with which they treated their own citizens who happened to be abroad was breathtaking, some of them didn’t make it home for the whole two years in which the borders were closed. There was no right way to deal with the pandemic, but the Australian reaction was an extreme manifestation of their hatred of the outside world, and their mistaken belief that they live in the best place on earth. Not only were their own people not allowed back in, but people – even those with permanent residency, but from elsewhere and without citizenship– were not allowed to leave. For two years we were held hostage to their weird complex, to their belief that if we were allowed to leave we would only want to come back to their Eden and clog up their concentration camp like quarantine system. I would like to repeat, there was no right way to deal with the pandemic, and letting everyone die was not the answer, I am not an anti-restriction conspiracy theorist, but the Australian way invoked took their inherent paranoia of the outside world and took it to fascistic levels.

Like 1930s Germany, the population was told that anything external was dangerous and must be excluded with extreme prejudice. Unlike 1930s Germany, they were not whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy, they were coaxed into a typically Australian xenophobic apathy – almost worse because of its pathological demand for conformity. Despite coming from elsewhere, and having elderly family over there who I was worried about, the idea that I might be against this policy was met with blank stares and a lack of comprehension.

Why would anyone want to leave? Why would anyone complain? An end point to all these restrictions? - the idea didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. They were happy to remain trapped forever, with no complaint about the mad abuses of power which the government imposed. The internal border closures. The sudden press conferences announcing an immediate lockdown because of one case. The self-funded hotel stays to which you were marched by armed police as soon as your plane touched down during those periods during the two years when you were allowed to visit other parts of the country. My girlfriend missed her grandmother’s funeral because, although at that point she allowed to leave her state, she had no idea when she would have been allowed in. Her mother went and was stuck for a couple of months. This was two years into the pandemic, when the rest of the world was going back to normal. As always, any complaint about this was met with the usual blank, gormless looks.

I have been all over Europe, Latin America, India, parts of South East Asia and the Middle East, and I have never been to a place anywhere near as shit as Australia. I would almost prefer it if my complaints were met with anger by Australians, but just like any point of comparison with the outside world, it is met with a blank, gormless lack of understanding and quickly forgotten. Dissent (reality) cannot break through the brainwashing which the cult of isolation has so successfully imposed on the population. Australia is irrelevant. It is the arse end of nowhere. I hope it does sink into the sea.