GEORGINA NAIDU

(She/her)
Actor and lecturer

24 June 2021
Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung Country

I’m Georgina Naidu. I’m a single mum, an actor, [and] a lecturer at Melbourne Uni in the theatre department. I live in Bunyip, which should be regional Victoria because it’s 84 kilometres away, but apparently, we’re in Metro.

During lockdown, most people I know assumed that I had the privileges of someone in a regional area, which I didn’t, but I did have the safety and security of being in a small community. The beauty of being here, even in lockdown, was that we live on a walking track. We’re in the main town in a house, but we’re on the main walking track, and it’s beautiful. Also, we could go out in the morning and sit on the veranda and everyone else would be doing their walking, and people were so eager to connect. So it would be, “Good morning!” And I was very eager as well, “Hi! How are you?” And people would say, “Have you got everything you need?” which was lovely. There’s one older couple who offered toilet paper. He said, “We didn’t hoard, we just happened to buy a lot just before lockdown. So, if you need toilet paper, let us know.” Our local supermarket started doing home deliveries, which they didn’t do before lockdown – it was very old school. You just rang and said what you wanted, and they’d bring it, or you could take a photo of your shopping list. It wasn’t brands, you would just say, “I need pasta, I need this, I need that.” They were lovely, they were the people I saw the most. There was a lot of care, so I felt very supported. The thing was, we’d only been here for about six weeks before lockdown started, so [I wasn’t] embedded in this community. I didn’t really know anyone, so that was great.

Having said that, it was just me and the kids, and no one could help me. No one outside of Victoria really understood that I couldn’t get people in to help me. Although being out here gave us freedom, and it’s beautiful, there was a particular kind of isolation in just being here with the kids. I have one girlfriend who lives in Bunyip, and she would pull up her car and we’d talk on the phone to each other, but there were nights when I wanted to just stand on the veranda. I’d go outside and look at the sky at night and I’d want to just scream, but then I didn’t want to worry anyone. [Just being able to] just go for a walk by myself. That seemed such a luxury, just to be able to leave.

I feel I’ve become quite insular, and that makes me a bit nervous. How do I make sure that I give my kids a big life? How do I do that when we can’t fly overseas or even interstate? How do we get a sense of where we fit within the world? My kids are from other cultural backgrounds – I had planned to go and live in Indonesia for a while and for them to go to a particular school and learn the language, and now I wonder if we’ll ever get to do that. It’s about thinking about how to connect them with those things. My parents took us overseas when we were really young, so we understood what privilege meant and realise[d] how incredibly fortunate we were to [imbibe] a sense of social justice. How will I do that if we’re in Bunyip for the rest of our lives?