KRISTEN SMYTH

(She/her)
Policy worker and writer

25 June 2021
Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung Country

My name is Kristen Smyth, and I live in Northcote here in Melbourne. I think I’ve had different experiences with the pandemic, and I suppose the milestones are lockdown specific. [My partner and I] have a nine- year-old boy, Magnus. There are two things that are probably the most time consuming. One has been home schooling and then the other has been the time spent thinking about trying to find a way [to normalise] the experience, and that’s quite tricky. I have multiple different jobs – the joys of being an artist and a policymaker, especially a health policymaker and political advocate. I’m used to a level of chaos that has prepared me very well for what we are now in the middle of. I think that’s something about artists as well, we’re very adaptable in a crisis. It’s been very interesting seeing the gender[ed] response to this. I think women are much better in [a] crisis, at dealing with uncertainty and with answering, “What can I do now? What’s the next thing that I can do that’s useful?” And having a mind that allows [us] to work out the logistics of how to get through the next 24 hours.

I think one of the lessons that I’ve observed quickly in COVID and lockdown in 2020 was that we need time to reflect, and that might’ve happened on tram or plane journeys – remember the plane trips longer than four hours? The time for thinking and allowing ourselves to just sort of seep into the life that we’ve had over a period of time – that’s gone. We’re now at [a point where] life is a series of one hour Zoom, WebEx, or Teams meetings, it’s a series of home- schooling sessions. It’s like Monday to Friday is now just hour by hour. And there’s something about [getting] to the end of each day and [feeling] like you’re in a sort of Groundhog experience where you can’t remember breaking up the monotony of turning the lights out, saying good night to your partner, going to sleep, waking up, doing it again.

When I’m with my health policy colleagues, I often joke that the level of health literacy has gone
up globally and that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to reset the way we consider society, care and engagement with those less fortunate, because we all experienced a form of trauma. Now we’ve just had our fourth lockdown here in Melbourne, it seems to have cascaded a trauma that has been latent for quite a long time because we haven’t really had a chance to process last year’s lockdowns. One of the undoubted impacts of trauma is [that] it binds us; we’ve experienced it together. I think as a community [we have] discovered that we are social creatures, that we do need to be connected with each other in some way. That’s quite beautiful, I think that’s
a gift that COVID has given us.