It’s a flashback to the most searing images of the Cold War: families separated by a border wall and police patrols. Except, we’re not talking about Berlin, 1961.
No, 60 years later it’s Australian families who are being kept apart, even on Father’s Day, by a literal wall.
How has it come to this? A Father’s Day when families are separated by a line on the map, when mum on one side of a closed state border passes the baby to dad for a fleeting hug because he can’t come home.
I suppose we should be grateful that the ‘Staussie’ at least begrudgingly allow families to hug across the wall, without shooting them.
In the 1970s, the Queensland/NSW border dividing Coolangatta from Tweeds, running through the literal Boundary Street, was often the flashpoint for demonstrations. On the Queensland side of the street, gatherings of more than three people were strictly controlled by the Bjelke-Petersen government, so protesters would mass on the NSW side of the road.
Once again, Boundary Street is the most grimly visible site of an Australia divided up into isolated prison-states by power-hungry premiers.
The frustration overflowed in Coolangatta as the Covid barrier between virus-light Queensland and locked-down NSW became a scene of tears and longing on what was supposed to be a day of loving get-togethers.
If the border remains closed this could be a foretaste of Christmas in a country held hostage to shuttered borders and bickering premiers with very different ideas of how to live with the virus as more and more Australians are vaccinated.
The country has been held hostage for the past 18 months. Families have been divided and brutalised by draconian rules. Countless people have been left to die alone; their families denied a last visit. Even in death, dignity is stripped away, with coffins standing alone in near-empty churches, and family and friends allowed only to watch blurry, jittery videos over Zoom.
Travelling interstate has become a harsh lottery, with premiers slamming borders shut at a moment’s notice, as Sean Harapeet found.
Mr Harapeet works as a fly-in, fly-out mine worker in distant Mount Isa and made the heartbreaking decision to spend his time off in Brisbane when the border shut, leaving wife Haylee to struggle on with the kids at Cabarita on NSW’s north coast.
“I want him to come home,” [son Hudson, 8] said after the all-too-brief reunion.
Bradley Church’s emotional catch-up with partner Jodie Hollis and their 10-month-old daughter Isabella was equally bittersweet. The young Queenslander works at a racehorse stable in Murwillumbah, NSW, and hasn’t been home since mid-August.
“I haven’t cried in a very good time and I welled up when I saw Isabella today,” Mr Church said.
“She almost didn’t recognise me when we first got there, I’ve only seen her through the phone on FaceTime. It’s been three weeks and she’s already got another tooth since I’ve seen her.”
But the Queensland premier who refused an ill, pregnant mother permission to hop across the border for emergency surgery, clearly wasn’t about to bend for something as trivial as Father’s Day.
Nowhere is the impact on ordinary lives more compelling than on the Gold Coast, where the closed border is patrolled by police, keeping wives from husbands, children from dad, people from work, kids from attending school.
The anger in the community has already sparked violent demonstrations. Police sympathised this time, handing out masks instead of fines when fed-up families bent the health rules for Father’s Day.
There was a deep, abiding sadness as people did what they could to reach out to loved ones.
But, with all the arrogance of the true dictator, Annastacia Palaszczuk lectured her minions that they should be “grateful”.
“This is the sort of Queensland I want.”
Which says it all, really.
But Plucka is only the festering head on the swelling boil of power-mad premiers across the country.
WA was likely to stay sealed off until next year – well after the 80 per cent benchmark was achieved nationally and in the West. Tasmania went a step further, with free travel unlikely to be reinstated until 90 per cent double vaccine coverage was reached, according to Acting Premier Jeremy Rockliff.
A “nuanced” border policy is still being eyed by South Australian Premier Steven Marshall.
The Australian
These people will never let us be free, if they can help it.
Mr Morrison, tear down these walls.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD