The COVID-19 Pandemic, while far from over, shall certainly be remembered in the annals of history, not only for triggering what is arguably a series of the most prolific social changes in most of our lifetimes. Almost overnight, we became harrowingly familiar with video conferencing software and the tanalising prospect of continuing our educational journeys – in whatever stage we were at – in some form of online state, usually from the comfort of our bedrooms. And for this, not to mention assorted government’s response or lack thereof to the fifth deadliest pandemic in history, will be remembered in the annals of history. Yet today I would like to focus on one particular niche of history. Whatever happened to Lot’s Wife during COVID-19.
Allow me to set the scene, the year is 2020 – duh – and Dao Hu, Ryan Attard, Austin Bond, Milly Downing, Weng Yi Wong, Anna Fazio, Charith Jayawardana, and Vivien Tranhere are beginning their year as editors of Lot’s Wife. Familiarising themselves with the intricacies of InDesign – the software used to produce Lot’s Wife – and settling into the Lot’s Wife office.
Their first edition, released in Orientation Week, in both physical and digital form, featuring various contributions from analysis to paintings to poems, many of which conveyed the raw emotion and devastation that followed the 2019/2020 Black Summer Bushfires that scorched across much of Australia’s east coast. The first signs of the next disaster – in an entirely different form.
By the time this first edition was released, COVID-19 was beginning to reach Australian shores and precautions were being taken – O-Fest was cancelled or adapted to occur in safer environments. When the second edition of the year was released in the middle of semester two things had drastically changed.
Classes had been moved to an online format on Zoom, and most students were now working from home wherever that may have been. The social aspects of university life were rapidly changing, to the disappointment of many. But, they, like billions of other people around the world, took these challenges in their stride. So too did Lot’s Wife.
Eager to continue to produce Lot’s Wife the editors took drastic measures “for the first time in our 56 year history, Lot’s Wife will not be printed”. In saying this, Lot’s Wife had been distributed online since 1996, coincidentally the year that Lot’s Wife launched its website. What was groundbreaking was the decision to not print physical copies of editions. This practice would continue for the remainder of the year. Undoubtedly, Lot’s Wife proved as it always had to be a place for university students to unleash their creative talents, vent to the world, and arguably most importantly maintain the social cohesion between students that the pandemic had made so vicarious.
The following year, some old faces and some new ones in the form of Ryan Attard, Dao Hu, Anvita Nair, Xenia Sanut, Olibia Shenken, Priya Singh-Kaushal, Linda Chen, James Spencer, Kathy Lee, and Anna Fazio returned to campus and the Lot’s Wife office, where copies of 2020’s only print edition were still to be found on stands in the Campus Centre and Menzies Building. They to would encounter troubles with COVID-19 and took the decision both out of practicality of all the short-term lockdowns that plagued the first half of 2021 and as a form of “reflecting the wider societal shift online”. Though by the end of the year, most editions would return to an online setting.
By 2022, things had returned to relative normality, albeit with a pandemic still raging across the globe, and print editions returned to the hands of readers around Monash.
