I must admit I am a bit shaky right now, hives have broken out and a nervous tick has developed in my right eye.  

I think the reason for these new nuisances is trolling through the Covid  photos.  In 2020 there was a lot going on, we  had pivoted our publication to a weekly newspaper size and paper quality, which we only printed twice and then swiftly turned back to the magazine format, but we remained a free weekly publication for the next year.  

This tumultuous time, which included Donna’s mother passing away, not because of Covid but because of the disruption the virus had caused in hospitals, staffing situations and sheer making it up as you go along scenarios.  

My accountant Matt Richardson from Cooke and Foley in Ballarat had just had a newborn child which was adding to his stress levels. But he was on the other end of the phone helping me keep the air in the tyres of the business 24/7.  

Matt said something that stuck with me.

“If a pig had flown past the window at that point I would have simply acknowledged it, things were that crazy.”  

For me, if I had to pull my worst moment from the whole experience it would  have to be when former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian asked at a press briefing for companies which could re-tool to make respirators and lots of them. Bloody hell….  

But through the haze and the noise I must have had the presence of mind to ask for and store our communities’ images.

Unfortunately, I have no idea who actually contributed those images, but please take the time to reflect on them, and thank-you to the good folks who sent them in.  

While a lot of people were stuck at home under the doona or cleaning out their pantries, we dug in hard here at TL HQ.

The first hard job was to let everyone go and snap back to the original team, just Donna and I. As we made the calls through tears and frustration, all of our crew said they would work for free for as long as it takes,  which caused a lot more tears.  

For obvious reasons, advertisers rang in thick and fast cancelling their adverts with the exception of a few, who although their businesses were in hibernation, wanted to make sure our community kept its newspaper.

The historical newspaper for Hepburn Shire, The Advocate, quickly closed its doors after a hundred years or so profiting off the community. But you know what they say when the going gets tough, the tough get going.  

So, we pivoted and worked hard. The paper would go to the printer on Sunday,  we would allow ourselves a Monday morning sleep in and start the next one on the Monday afternoon.

I would shoot people photos in my studio which was the Glenlyon Reserve, it had everything I needed – lots of fresh air, social distancing, light and shelter under the trees from the weather.

And here we are five years later and all I  can say is thank F #K that’s over. Covid anniversary rant over…  

The Local journalist and delivery driver Tony Sawrey  

Empty roads. Diary of a delivery driver in the times of Covid.  I like driving open roads. I find the activity good for thought. And when the  plague came in 2020 I had plenty of time to enjoy those empty expanses of bitumen.  

When you work for a regional newspaper, the fences separating different roles tend to fall over. When I started at The Local several years before, I was pecking out stories, maybe doing a little photography when needed and eventually I started sharing delivery duties.

Soon it became a regular gig, was better than loading Christmas trees and was a nice opportunity to tour the shire.  

Anyway, I was doing the fortnightly pick-up and deliveries when everything went unusual. Not that much changed in my area of the forest though. Things were  actually quite idyllic, what with the drop in traffic volumes and a total absence of anyone in the bush. Happy days.  

But gradually The Local turned into a vital means of public communication,  especially since many of the other regional newspapers decided to quit or move online.

And suddenly I had become an essential worker and was working harder than I had ever cared to before or since. The mag had gone weekly, I had to produce more  stories and of course the delivery work doubled.  

Out on the freeway heading off to pick up our consignment from the (now  closed) print plant in Ballarat the only vehicles on the road were trucks travelling in  convoy and me. No impatient BMW M3 drivers, lumbering caravans or commuting  tradies bunching up and weaving about.

It was a form of bliss especially to someone like me who likes to drive. It was like the 1970s all over again, me a kid in the back seat staring at the empty tarmac ahead while counting the passing big rigs.  

Every week I would go out, an essential worker as I was, distributing important material for the good of the community. What an unusual position to be in.

From  Daylesford to Trentham, from Clunes to Creswick I would drive, dropping off  bundles at empty supermarkets and general stores. Everything else was shut. No cafés, no tourist info centres, no hotels or eateries.  

And you know what? People were actually glad to see me. How is that?

I shifted from a ghost with a hand trolley, a nothing people stepped around getting their morning coffee to a form of good news walking.  

“Good morning. Is that the paper?” a bemasked elderly person would say. “It is so  nice to have a paper to read.”  

“It is great you are still delivering,” says another. “That other mob gave up.”  

These were typical responses. In times when nothing was particularly normal, all  people could do was wait for things to get better.

The regular appearance of a bundle of nice fresh crinkly Locals in the supermarket basket became more than just a paper.  The Local became almost like.. like a beacon of light, a hope for better days ahead and I, the delivery guy was the messenger.

Above, Tony Sawrey and Logic 

Springs Medical Centre GP Brad Wyer  

When I reflect on our journey over the past five years with Covid, you need to remember the different stages and what we knew at the time.  

As medical professionals, early 2020 we were watching a virus cut through Europe, in particular Italy, where young, healthy people and pregnant women were suddenly dying, not to mention those with health concerns and over 70.

It was rumoured Italy did not have enough health resources and would not ventilate a patient with Covid if they were over 60 due to the level of disease.  

So, when Covid came knocking on Australia’s door there was a lot of fear about what was to come. Primary care centres, it must be said, at the start were left out in the cold by the government.

We could not procure personal protective equipment,  we were not included in health policies on how to protect certain locations, it was all hospital and aged care based.  

For the first few months we had to fend for ourselves. I remember vividly my wife  asking me on Tuesday night, March 10, 2020 as I stared vacantly at the ceiling: “Was  I ok? “No I was not”.  

If we had a staff member with Covid, it meant all those in contact isolating for two weeks, which meant we had no staff to care for the public or help the hospital.  

Amongst all that fear, came a moment the people of the Central Highlands should  recognise, what great people you have working at Springs.  

It was then we divided into work teams, three groups who would never work  together and were asked not to mingle together after work even outside lockdowns.  

This to operate Kyneton (a clinic we had only just opened at the time), Trentham  and Daylesford. This they did for many months, and it meant no matter what, we  always had a team available to care for the community.

Over the year, we did get great  support from Central Highlands Rural Health in staffing clinics to test for Covid,  (the nurses were amazing) and Western Victorian Primary Health Network worked  diligently to get us PPE to protect our staff.

We rolled out vaccination clinics when  the time came to vaccinate over 10,000 people.  There were many difficulties along the way and new learnings.

Protective shields  at the front desk, the ever-changing isolation criteria, and questions our staff had to ask such as if people had been holidaying overseas to having contacts with Covid, which meant a telephone consult first.  

Consulting at times in face masks, shields and gloves made the interaction alien  and difficult. The number of times I was speaking loudly to have patients hear me, combined with the fact the face shield acted like an echo chamber, making it louder  for me.  

I remember at one of our first ‘flu vaccination clinics, a woman attended  amazingly well dressed. I had to ask where she was going as we were in lockdown at the time.

She replied: “Brad, I haven’t been out for six weeks so I wanted to make an  effort.” These are the beautiful memories I keep.  

Now five years later, I try to look at the good that has come from it. I sympathise  with those who have lost loved ones to this virus, or those who suffered consequences of the vaccination program. But within that, there is no doubt the program has saved  lives and health costs.  

The introduction of telehealth was brought on by Covid-19. The ability for patients to have Medicare rebates to get health advice over the phone has been  something we have wanted for years.

I also believe we all now have insights into when  we are unwell, not wanting to spread an illness. Gone are the days where one of the  easiest places to get sick was the doctors’ office, where people would sit in the waiting  room with fevers, and coughing and spreading the illness they had.

Now we have the  safety of the isopod where we can safely see ill patients to protect ourselves, staff and  others. Previously I would get sick from patients two to three times a year.  

Finally, my biggest take home, working at Springs Medical. Watching these wonderous staff support people who were scared and frightened, helping them through the worst, and also dividing into teams so as to mean we always had a workforce available.

This they did while looking after their own family. You could not  ask for a better bunch of people.  

Although we have a family of magpies at TL HQ,  I have never been attacked, that is until a recent trip to Melbourne.  

My relationship with the birds was galvanised during the pandemic. Each day after toiling away on the paper, in the cut and thrust of lockdowns, Donna and I would sit down with a drink on the balcony, rain, hail or shine and feed our black and white feathered friends.  

At the time we would barely see anybody. We would collect our groceries at the Click and Collect in Woodend and then spend half an hour cleaning them on the  stove hob and in the sink. I would light up the hob after the food cleaning exercise to kill bugs and spray the sink with Glen 20.

The booze was delivered courtesy of the good people at Cellarbrations in Daylesford and it would spend a few days on the back deck de-bugging.  

Exercise was with a mask around the Glenlyon Reserve and an excursion to  get out of the house was a drive through Daylesford with the air conditioning on reticulation as recommended by a nurse we know.

The world was upside down and if  a pig had flown past the window, I would have simply said ‘G’day’.

But back to the backyard birds. They were all individually named – there  was Uncle Bulgaria, Dumper Duck and Puffy just to name a few. It was a multi generational family of maggies that even during the breeding season never swooped, I  have heard they do recognise individual people.

Yes, it was crazy times and at times I  thought I was going crazy, but things were what they were.

Speaking of crazy and before I bore you with the rest of my magpie yarn, scan the  QR code below to check a battle myself and my nephew had.

It was during an alien invasion at a recent virtual reality experience and will also give you some insight into the vocal levels during the magpie attack.  

But back to bird skirmishes. I have chuckled my fair share of times at the  “funniest home video style” antics of folks I have seen being attacked both on video and IRL.

The screams, gyrations and at times, flesh wounds, as folks throw themselves on the ground, crash their bikes and do the ‘hands in the air’ dance.

Now it was my turn. As I walked around the corner under a low set of trees in a garden bed, I felt the first contact of the claws on my head.

My first reaction was to put my sunglasses on my head as swoop two commenced with that horrible snapping noise they make with their beaks.  

My second defence was to yell out “I know Uncle Bulgaria and his family” as I  got lower into the garden.

There seemed to be no escaping this pair of protective dive bombers, I kept running and stumbling into the undergrowth.

At one stage, in an  effort to pull some speed off my combination headfirst run and breakdance move, I  hooked my arms around a tree trunk to slow me down and skun up my wrists, only  to look up and see the mad bastard birds were  only a metre from my face.  

I did a backwards worm through the undergrowth that would have won at the Olympics, and then that was it, I was  obviously at the limit of their protection  zone.

I finally emerged from the urban jungle bloodied, bruised and breathless, with a large  audience looking on at the man responsible for the blood curdling screams.  

Embarrassing bird rant over.  

Hepburn Shire locals are among Victorians now able to pick up two free packets of RATs through their local council to help with early detection and treatment of Covid-19.

State health minister and Macedon MP Mary-Anne Thomas said the council RAT distribution program was
operating across more than 200 local sites, such as libraries and council customer service centres. All eligibility requirements have been removed.
Individuals can collect up to two packets for themselves plus up to two packets for each household member per visit while people with a disability or their carer can collect up to four packets of tests.