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Covid

‘We right to go?’

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The ABR Podcast
Leggatt

This week on The ABR Podcast Johanna Leggatt reviews Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden. She quotes from the book: ‘There will be another pandemic. It might not happen for another century, or it might happen very soon.’ Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. Listen to Johanna Leggatt’s “‘We right to go?’ Heeding the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic”, published in the October issue of ABR.

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Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden

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October 2024, no. 469
Johanna Leggatt reviews ‘Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race’ by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden

The Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues, the taped-up playgrounds, the closed borders. The stranded cruise ships, the panic buying of toilet paper, the unrelenting and crushing boredom of our four walls. Personally, I can’t see a North Face jacket without a visceral flashback to our erstwhile Victorian premier and his trademark press conference opener: ‘We right to go?’ The desire to forget all of this, to move on from the pandemic, is what makes Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race such an important contribution to the literature of Covid-19 post-mortems.

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