Parrot at table with tamarind pod, 14 April, 2020

 Three weeks of self-isolation have passed but it seems longer because the world keeps changing. Australia is even more cut off than it was when as a child my family travelled to England on a P&O passenger ship, taking six weeks. A torrent of deaths in Britain puts older people on a wartime footing. A well-travelled friend does all her meeting in Europe by Zoom, and has one early morning walk to the promenade at Hastings via a park where there are suddenly robins. She can't see her mother in a nursing home, which has become enclosed like a Trappist nunnery.  Exhausted travellers from many countries struggle to get charter flights back to Australia, returning to two weeks quarantine.

People on the Tiwi Islands were used to being cut off. The tamarind pod with its double bulge comes from a great shady tree  seeded by Macassans from Indonesia who came each year to harvest sea slugs for the Chinese market. An artist friend there said as we talked about Covid 19, "well we could just go bush again like we did in the war". The antiquity of the Tiwi people, who have lived on their islands for possibly ten thousand years, makes the ancientness of Greeks and Romans look recent. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Parrot at table with tamarind pod', watercolour on Canzon paper, 15 x 21 cm, 14 April, 2020