​Roger Horrocks is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Auckland. He has been a biographer, film-maker and poet and has helped to establish many media and arts organizations.

We are living through major historical changes. I want to focus on one aspect – how the media have changed. That is less important than the tragic human cost of the pandemic, but it is something that influences my working life. The pandemic has thrown us more deeply into the internet age. Celluloid film had already been eclipsed, and other media were under serious financial pressure, including printed newspapers, magazines and books, broadcast television and radio, etc. The lockdown condensed years of change into a few months. I know there have been exceptions – some renewed interest in printed books and broadcast news – but all analogue forms of culture have been battered by the combination of the lockdown and the accompanying recession. Writers have seen publishers go out of business. Music and theatre people have lost venues for live performance. At present, every arts organization and every individual artist I know has financial worries, more so than usual. There will need to be a major effort to rebuild (or rethink) much of our culture. That will involve the perennial struggle of our small, marginal country to deal with offshore owners and large corporations – the corporations in control of the digital world, which have been strengthened by the lockdown.
​ 
Of course, the internet has many wonderful capabilities, and our society will innovate and adapt to this new age. But we need to remember that the technology also has problematic aspects, described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism and by documentaries such as The Social Dilemma. One of the strengths of the internet is its global scope, but we need to avoid being smothered by the flood of material from sources which seek to manipulate or profit from us. I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s and remember the banal atmosphere of a New Zealand that was still colonial and other-directed.

I hope that our country’s remarkable experience in escaping the worst of the pandemic can help strengthen our desire to remain a unique, independent, diverse society. COVID-19 has emphasised our sense of community and reminded us we can do things differently from other countries. Not that we can’t also be citizens of the world, which will be crucial in dealing with the on-going crisis of climate change.

​Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Auckland University for 25 years. She has 26 books in print/translation globally.
 
Covid 2020 continues to be a process of painful letting go. The death of my dear mother. Not being able to grieve or be hugged by whanau. Getting my partner here from Orkney, borders closing everywhere, car stranded. Eighteen airfares dropped. Deadline to get whanau home. Finally, Quatar. 3,600 one way. Strange sights at Heathrow. My partner wakes, surrounded by astronauts and beekeepers, passengers masked. Beginning of covid. We knew so little then. Our meeting masked up and in isolation.
 
I’ve been playing in five bands, riffing, solo concerts and gigs. One by one, our work gets cancelled. Musicians thrive on playing together. We try to meet on zoom. Not the same.
 
Twenty one years of touring Europe, USA, Canada as an author and performing with my translator, culminating in NZ as Guest at Frankfurt Book Fair. Then eight years of joint elder care in different countries. Culminating in Covid.
 
We isolate in my bay. Eat from our forest garden and support local veg stands. No supermarkets for us oldies! A brief time of celebration. Then clearing house. 21 years of book tours, disastrous tenants, leaky home lead to a massive clearing. As best as I can muster on joints waiting knee replacement. 13 months now. Delayed by Covid. Terrible pain, especially at night.
 
Then I am reminded to give thanks for life BC. Before Covid. For all those suffering  job losses, family disintegration, struggling to survive on  meagre or no wages; discrimination everywhere; trying to avoid conspiracy theories flying at us from all sides my mother would say, like the Dalai Lama, Never Give Up. And she did not. Until the very end. She loved the daily broadcasts. Reminded her of the war. And the vital need to work together.
 
When I consider this time, still feeling pain and loss, I am reminded. Never Give Up. No matter what is happening. Never Give Up. Covid is a time of letting go. Hold onto what matters, let go of the rest.
 
He aha te mea nui? What is most important in life?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is people, people, people.

​David Arrowsmith is a history teacher and writer who lives in Auckland. He is married to Hilary, a librarian, and they have three daughters: Charlotte in Manchester, Penny in Wellington, and Kim in Tamaki Makaurau. David has published one novel, Wesley Jones, a coming-of-age story set in rural South Auckland in the sixties. He is currently working on a memoir based on his father’s Kodachrome slides of life in a farming community in the 1960s.
 
In late February 2020, I accepted a full-time teaching offer at a South Auckland secondary school. I was already two years into semi-retirement when at the age of 67 a new teaching experience began. Little did I know then that my decision to return to teaching would be impacted by Covid-19.   I was in the process of getting to know staff and students and learning the system at my new school when, within a month and with minimal preparation, we were thrown into lockdown.
 
Suddenly I had to learn how to navigate ‘Google Meets’ with my classes — taking the roll and chasing up the other half of the class who'd become disengaged from learning. I was required to makes notes on every online communication on a spreadsheet, be they phone calls, emails, or text messages, with every student in each of my six classes. The Ministry of Education wanted the data to analyse the Covid-19 education experience. Tracking students and data entry began to supersede teaching.
 
On weekly online sessions on ‘Google Classroom’ I quickly learned how to scroll down documents and YouTube clips about Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler to motivate the kids from a distance. I learnt to close my laptop 5pm Friday and not open it until 8am Monday knowing there would be umpteen emails from students with drafts of assessments to check, or asking for assistance. There’d be a Google Meet code for the principal's briefing with eighty staff at 8.30am. I'd ring disengaged students at two in the afternoon only to be told by their parent they were asleep. I'd email students who weren't producing any work on Google Classroom and learn that after a month of lockdown they were still waiting for the promised laptop from the Ministry. I'd discover students working full-time to help put food on the table for their family.
 
I tried to create a work/life balance at home. This meant daily bike rides or walks, meditation, reading great authors like Hilary Mantel or rereading classics like The Wind in the Willows. Keeping in touch with my daughters by social media became crucial. The 1pm 'Jacinda and Ashley Show' on TV One became a daily ritual with Hilary to learn the latest development in the virus crisis. I learnt to play the Gold Card game at the supermarket to avoid the queues until Countdown banned it and I had to shop at New World who still allowed the privilege. It meant the ongoing quest for engaging TV drama on Netflix and discovering great productions like The Crown.
 
One of the frustrating aspects of the new teaching load in the time of Covid-19 was its impact on a new writing project I’d started in January. With Deborah Shepard as mentor, I had started work on a memoir of my father based around his wonderful Kodachrome slides of 1960s rural South Auckland that he'd taken as a newly arrived English immigrant. As the themes from the photos emerged, and the writing became more focused, and the family research proved surprising and enthralling, the pressure from my teaching job increased. Students' NCEA assessments were pouring in. Marking was time-consuming. I was also required to write very detailed reports on students' progress for parents. By the end of a school term that effectively lasted from February to July, I was exhausted and in need of a break in Taupo. With Deborah's support, the memoir is still on track as we experience a second unexpected and unwanted lockdown for Auckland in August. Whoever would have thought my year would unfold in this way.

​1
 
A Tuesday twilight in the middle of August: we’re on the point of sleeping, the panorama from our languorous home stretching out across dark estuary water to faint lights on opposite shores, when our phones tremble. We stir to discover our screens are ripe with an unexpected offering:
 
 
COVID 19 ALL OF GOVERNMENT RESPONSE: ….
 
 
2
 
What we read stuns us. In the moment of scanning it, of beginning to process it, the news that there are new Covid-19 positive cases in our Auckland community feels as if it belongs elsewhere: to a half-forgotten time perhaps; to an era thought eliminated; a trauma exorcised; an ailment cured. Perhaps this reaction, instinctive and not entirely rationale, is to be expected; perhaps, at some point in the future when I will return to this moment to reflect upon it, my response will seem illogical, naïve. But the mind and heart too often process the unusual and unexpected in ways which aren’t always reasonable or impartial. So often too, their instinctive riposte appeals to the self. So there it is: a late night awakening, a blurry sense of déjà vu, a sudden emotional and psychological unsettlement, a disruption to our everyday already stealing through the darkness outside... 
 
 
3
 
As a displaced person exiled by whanau and ancestry, dislocation is an experience and a feeling I know too well. I’ve long grown used to expecting it, encountering it and adapting my routines to contain it. Still the spectral slumber which besets me becomes an articulation about displacement: fractured recollections of the Lockdown conjoined by distortions of the Level 3 at the edge of its materialisation …
 
4
 
In the morning, when I wake, I turn to transformation; or is it regression? I re-establish my son’s online schooling, recreate the technological delivery of my under- and postgraduate teaching and reorder my writing life into snatches of creative time. The hidden stresses of those who work and have school-age children, who are asked to simultaneously supervise education of their offspring and their workload: these become my familiars once again ….  

​Cynthia and her family live in the lee of Mt Atkinson, the first hill you meet as you approach the Waitakere Ranges from Auckland. The sides of the hill are clad in the olive greens of kauri, rimu and tall kanaka with a spattering of houses set in amidst the trees, whose warm lights shine out from the mists which wrap around the peak in winter. There is a clearing at the top and from there you can see all of Auckland, out to the seas and to the horizons, beyond which lie Chile on one side and Australia on the other.
 
The kitchen of our house was where I ministered to others during lockdown. I over-filled my family and the freezer with the results of slow, time laden cooking; with red wine reductions, miso butter, Lebanese garlic pastes, pâtés, soups, elaborate meals, fragrant loaves of warm ciabatta and baking fresh from the oven. And, despite what was happening to us all, I was happy. I was serving up care for those I loved.
 
If being confined to this space was a restriction, a yoke, then it inexplicably sat lightly upon my shoulders. I had a contribution to make.
 
Those sunny lockdown weeks seem an age ago now. For some time, as winter approached, we have gone about our lives at alert level 1. The risks of the virus here are very low. Restrictions on domestic movement and interactions have been relaxed.
 
And yet I am not.
 
I have become hypervigilant. Over alert. It turns out that, for me, lockdown has a long, restless tail. I am unable to relax, perpetually aware that, as we go about our unfettered lives, our islands sit in a blessed, calm pool, while the rest of the world is battened down in the midst of a hurricane. Below the horizon, life looks normal, yet illness has touched the lives of us all, and uncaged, is frantically beating her dirty wings in the storm, spreading droplets and fear.
 
Even in my sleep I mine the minutiae of my days for any anomaly which indicates something hidden, something buried just beneath the surface. I have developed a crepuscular habit of wide-awake worry. My ears are pinned back, and my tail is tucked between my legs. This is not my way. But the virus is a threat I don’t know how to fight.
 
So, as there is nothing I can contribute now, I am trying to be still and to breathe slowly as life gets busy and demanding again. I seek a pause, a moment, an opportunity to rub balm on a perpetual itch, a subcutaneous state of concern for our world. 
 
I find these moments in the eyes of my dog; in the shine on the back of an emerald ladybird resting briefly on the leaves of the rhododendron; in bird song from high in the trees; and in the tilt of a blackbird’s head as she listens intently to the industry of worms beneath her feet. The winter snowdrops, little silent white bells rung by the breeze, bring quiet moments of delight.
 
It is to the lessons of nature, not escitalopram that I turn to calm myself. I want to be able to look our new future in the face without fear, allow myself to contribute again and help build something different and better after the storm passes. And it will. That is one of nature’s lessons.

Faith Cleverley is a journalist in Tamaki Makaurau. She graduated from the AUT Postgraduate Journalism course in 2019 with the top journalism diploma and the deans award in communications.  She has a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University in Criminology and Social Policy. Faith is invested in diversifying the types of stories we see and read in Aotearoa. She lives above the Zoo with her sister and friend. 

The days of quarantine are now a faint recollection. The constant assimilation required to survive these massive changes in our lives has dulled my memory.
 
I have been thinking about Covid-19 and the tragedy it has inflicted on our global community. The scale of this my mind cannot make sense of, particularly as we live in a haven that has (so far) avoided the suffering seen in other countries. Lives are becoming the collateral of greedy leadership.  
 
I have been thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement. It is from this abundance of time as people stay indoors that a grass roots political movement could take hold in the USA and worldwide. Capitalism has consistently insured against revolt through monopolising our time. The social revolution happening now has been made possible because people have had time to organise, protest and imagine. The speed in which our lives have drastically changed is hopeful, we are capable of rapid transformation when needs must…  and needs must.
 
I see empathy seeping into our collective consciousness. Most of my friends are receiving government support; job seekers benefits, unemployment cheques and artist’s subsidies, perhaps nurturing a generation of people who see no shame in needing. 
 
Coronavirus has exposed the innate neediness of being human. I see true freedom in knowing how much we need each other; to feel loved, to experience joy, to survive and succeed. To embrace needing completely is to know how to give and to love. 
 
I spent ‘lockdown’ at my home in Tamaki Makaurau. Our neighbour’s cat became part of our unit as we took joy in caring for her. We don’t know what her real name is but we called her Esthy. She is waiting outside my door when I come home from work most days. I imagine she wonders where we have gone. The hours of lounging on our front porch are over as “free” time leaks away into “productivity”. I am grateful I live now without fear of Covid-19. I feel lucky to spend more time with friends and family. I miss having time laid out endlessly before me.

​Eva de Jong is in her second year of studying for a Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University and completed a Creative Writing Course at the Institute of Modern Letters in 2020. Eva’s story ‘Islands’ was short-listed for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Youth Competition. Eva is passionate about writing and won the Prize for Poetry at Epsom Girls Grammar School in her senior year.
 
Over a socially-distanced morning tea break, Max tells Mary he loves her. Mary is looking into her coffee when he confesses:

“I love you, Mary.”

Mary pulls her dark hair behind her ear and removes a single Air-pod.
 
“I’m good Max, how are you?” 

“What?” he gasps, and then, “I-I’m good.” 

Two metres of hollow space separates their tables. It is a government-ordered chasm, a distance that sets everybody apart for their own good. It could have been an ocean.
 
“Lousy isn’t it?” Mary holds up a limp mask between her fingers. Max thinks again about how she has the most beautiful pale hands he has ever seen. 

“Lot of good it’ll do me; I can barely breathe in the bloody thing,” she sighs and Max gulps back the last of his coffee.

“It’s hard - it makes it hard, you know, to in some ways...breathe,” he agrees. Mary looks at him blankly.

“Yeah,” she says, “You alright mate?”

The curved points of Max’s ears are shiny and red, and he runs his hand over his glistening forehead.

“Yeah. Fine.” He drops his hand into his lap, eyes staying fixed on the wall ahead. 

“I think the extra shifts are getting to everyone,” she says gently. 

Max can feel her green eyes on him, soft and blinking.
 
“I better get back to work Mary,” he whispers hoarsely. Then he leaps up from his seat and yanks his mask back over his mouth.
 
“Oh. See you soon then, Max!” She calls.
 
Max turns from his table and walks quickly away. There is a single moment, between turning and walking, when he could reach her table across the two-metre gap.  He could touch the hand that rests there, wrist upturned and the palm glowing white, like light pulsing from a bacteria-ridden angel. 
 

Keith Woodley has been resident manager at the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for 27 years. He is the author of Godwits: Long-haul champions and Shorebirds of New Zealand: Sharing the margins.
 
What pandemic? The weather was benign. Across the paddocks to the north west, the bulky Hunua Ranges under a cloudless sky: across the bay to the east, the ridges of the Coromandel. A wheeling harrier overhead, and above the shoreline flocks of oystercatchers commuting to their high tide roost on the shell bank. Hard to countenance that, away from this idyll, the world was plunging into turmoil. 
My bubble was a big one: the Shorebird Centre and its grounds and the long strip of coastal reserve opposite. On one of my walks there were two figures in the landscape, about half a kilometre away. Just two weeks earlier, it had been common enough as people used the trail system between the bird hides. Now the first thought, though fleeting: who are these intruders into my space?

Familiar features were encountered in a new context. The pukekos normally resident around the pond and wider centre grounds, were now fossicking at the front steps. A white-faced heron took to standing on the deck peering in through the ranch slider. This I took to be neighbourhood watch.
Quite new was the scene at the eastern end of the Kopu bridge outside Thames. Trips to the supermarket were once routine, almost unthinking exercises. Three weeks into Level Four my return home was interrupted by a police checkpoint. The middle-aged constable leaning in through the window asking the purpose of my journey was certainly novel.

On Thursday April 2, a friend called.  ‘Commiserations’, she said. “For what?’ “The Listener, it is gone.’ I was a long-time subscriber but said I would only miss some of it. In recent months I was probably reading only one in four cover stories. There were, however, columnists I would certainly miss: Jane Clifton and anything by Paul Thomas. But it was a sudden death in the age of Covid. So was losing songwriter John Prine who had been part of my soundtrack since the 1970s. The concert in Auckland early last year now assumed enormous significance.

There was also a question of latitude. Diurnal cues – changing day-length – trigger hormonal changes that prompt a migratory bird to complete its moult, store fuel, and migrate. By the second half of April birds from New Zealand, bound for the Arctic, are refuelling along the coasts of China and Korea. Since 2015 that is where I have been at this time, counting shorebirds in North Korea. Now I am on the wrong side of the equator: thus, Anzac Day at home for the first time in five years.
​
But there was uplifting news of normal systems still functioning. Several of the godwits that had been fitted with GPS tags at Pūkorokoro in November, were now refuelling on the shores of the Yellow Sea. By Level Two, they were at breeding sites in Alaska. Even better was news of some particularly special red knots. These small shorebirds specialise in eating tiny shellfish. A few dozen birds had been affected by a suspected toxic algal bloom in February.  After two weeks recovery at rehabilitation centres, they were fitted with coded leg flags and released. That this happened on the eve of their normal migration departure for eastern Russia suggested they would be behind in their preparations and would remain here for the winter. But there was to be no lockdown for them. They too were seen in China.

​






























Based in Wellington, Gregory O'Brien is a poet, artist, essayist and art curator. His most recent books are 'Always song in the water' (AUP 2019) and Melvin Day--Painter (VUP 2019). An exhibition of his paintings, 'The wading birds of Drybread' opens at the Ashburton Art Gallery in August 2020. His art is also included in the group exhibition 'Wai--the water project' at Pataka Art Museum, Porirua.
 
Janet Frame’s The Carpathians will be the last of the novels published during her lifetime to be translated into French. Esperluete will be releasing the book early in 2021 (a few months later than planned) in a translation by Pierre Furlan. It was Pierre who contacted me in March this year to see if I was interested in doing cover artwork for the French edition. The last time I provided cover art for Esperluete had been a few years earlier—for John Mulgan’s Man Alone (‘Seul’), also translated by Pierre.
​
During the course of my correspondence with Pierre concerning the cover, he asked me a few questions about Janet Frame and some minor linguistic details of the book which were perplexing him. After what must have been a useful exchange of emails, he mentioned to the publisher the fact that I had visited Janet Frame a number of times while she was drafting the novel. As a result, they asked if I would be interested in writing an ‘Afterword’ for the forthcoming edition, offering a personal response to the book and possibly a way-in for French readers who, they suspected, might struggle with the strangeness of the novel and the unfamiliarity of its setting.

So it was that, during the Covid-19 lockdown, I found Janet Frame was very much in my bubble. I re-read Michael King’s biography, and I spent many hours mulling over two novels in particular--The Carpathians (‘Les Carpates’ in the French edition) and A State of Siege— both of which felt disarmingly attuned to the present global crisis. To be honest, both novels felt darker—and, certainly, more real—than when I last read them. Janet’s accustomed themes of social disintegration, dysfunction, toxicity, sanity, health and states of well-being had never felt more relevant. She remains, inarguably, the New Zealand writer most attuned to individual and societal manifestations of fragmentation and collapse. Towards the end of The Carpathians, the residents of Kowhai St in Puamahara (a thinly veiled Levin) are swept up in an apocalyptic course of events. It’s easy to start thinking that Janet Frame’s Memory Star, which is to blame for the empty streets and the altered ‘reality’ later in the book, is a precursor of the coronavirus: Covid-19 reconfigured as a satellite or asteroid. Her prescient novel has much to say of our current predicament and how we might eventually come to terms with it: ‘The inner tempests of a street, a town, a country, a world may be sensed, perhaps measured and recorded by poets and other artists, and later by historians, but it is certain they are not announced at the time of their happening.’
 
Gregory O’Brien

​Trevor M Landers, MA, MPM, MEd, is, currently based in New Plymouth. He has published six volumes of poetry, the last Heart of Joyful Fortune (2019) exploring his Buddhist praxis, in New Zealand and internationally. His next collection, Happy Birthday Suit, is due for release in early 2021.  He has been university lecturer, a senior public servant, a hospital orderly and a strawberry picker in Central Finland. He begins training as a psychotherapist in 2021. Ko Ngāti Airani rāua ko Ngāruahine tōna iwi hoki.
 
If you mistakenly think
       the shift to Level 2, renders you safe & immune
             read some COVID literature; this virus is a reproductive specialist
& emerging evidence,
                  + Professor Michael Baker,
                              apply to jittering amygdalas
           As influenza season approaches, brushfires can be bushfires in an instant
Look across to Japan, Singapore and then to Taiwan.
                 The first two allowed complacency and low infection rates,
                   did what we are doing ushered in public complacency,
                          the familiar upward curve,
                              the repellent sign of stacks of unadorned coffins.
 
In Taiwan mass-masking and all-island traceability
                vested a crown for the least per capita infections and death in the world
to wit, to be fully insured,
             we should be masked up outside,
              and be tracing much more rigorously
              than  the past three days,
               we have encountered ‘she’ll be right” and “the worst is over”.
 
  Naturelment, we hope to be spectacularly wrong,
                that our stringency is well-intentioned, misplaced, because if we are right
                                 21 dead will seem like a faraway Christmas present.
                                  So, stay safe, little Aotearoa,
            let caution and circumspection over-rule our complacent urge
                   to return to an unreachable past, the way we were.
              Let’s not stuff it up now.
Indeed, let’s do it a damn sight better,
       elaborate a vision so the next national emergency
                is not bequeathed to our mokopuna
         where the water dries up, when the mantle of the earth sizzles
        & their admonishing hands curse our reckless inaction.[1]
 


[1] This poem was originally called: ‘CoVID19: An admonition on opening up from Lockdown L3 and a strong hope that our stringency desires are overzealous (WIP), May 17, 2020’.