Come To Where I Am – Australia, Volume 4.

This is the fourth and final instalment in the series which livestreams original works by writers exploring their experience of life under COVID-19 restrictions in a range of remote and exotic locations around Australia. The pieces are read by the writers and the recordings are live-streamed. Each work reflects on the disturbances caused by the pandemic and the way lives have been dramatically disrupted.

Time Capsule: Meanjin by Merlynn Tong is an exuberant account of the effect of lockdown. She speaks from Brisbane, Queensland located in Turrbal and Chepara-Yugarapul country. Her vibrancy and vitality make the words burst into life as she tells how the experience can bring out both the best and the worst in humanity. Her story speaks about the wonders of community spirit and the solace of isolation as it slowly eats away at your soul. All of this recounted in minute and sometimes frenetic detail.

We Are Geelong by Ross Mueller is delivered from Geelong, Victoria in Wadawurrung country. His story is told in a very poetic manner. It is aptly accompanied by the sounds and image of suburbia which have been subjected to a COVID desertion, rendering the city a much more solemn place. His narrative tells of the devastating interruption to the city’s lively footy culture, which as at the heart of this community, and its incalculable impact on morale. 

In Dingo by Mary Anne Butler, who is speaking from Darwin, NT, located Larrakia country, describes her surroundings as drought stricken. The fragility and desolation of the landscape is reinforced in her language but especially the intensity of her emotions. The harshness of the place weighs heavily on her shoulders and the images of the smouldering earth and the suffering of the local wildlife is a stark reminder of how the pandemic only compounds already desperate situations.

Another Day In The Colony (In Three Scenes) by Ian Michael is told from Perth, WA in Whadjuk Noongar country. Michael’s story is a litany of the continued dispossession of Indigenous Australians and the ways in which their land has been, and continues to be, appropriated. Here COVID is cast as just another form of unwelcome invasion as areas are used for quarantine purposes. His fury and frustration is palpable. His desperate denouncement of so many historical and contemporary injustices is clearly portrayed as continuing to fall on deaf ears.

This project has been assisted by Create NSW, and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. All of the stories in Come To Where I Am Australia (volumes 1 to 4) can be streamed on-demand and free at www.criticalstages.com.au/screening-room

Patricia Di Risio