Early in March, Mum sends a text: ‘Hi Bec do you have a toilet paper shortage up there we do here lol none’. All of this panic is amusing at first; aren’t we all taking this—whatever this is—a little overboard? When I finally go to the local Woolworths, I tentatively walk down the toilet paper aisle, expecting that the buying panic has subsided, assuming Mum had blown things out of proportion when she said she drove to no less than eight different supermarkets to find it. And then I see it for myself: an entire aisle of empty shelves.

After that first apocalyptic glimpse into our ‘new normal’, every trip to the supermarket has induced a special kind of existential panic in me. I take note of each new disappeared item: flour, sugar, eggs, two-minute noodles (but not the wholegrain ones), deodorant, toothbrushes. What had been comical and perplexing at first—who needs that much deodorant anyway?—becomes grief-inducing. It takes me a few shopping trips to locate the source of that grief (thanks to many years of therapy, probably). The bare shelves make me feel the same way I feel when I see houses that have the faded carcasses of children’s toys on the nature strip—an uncanny throwback to growing up in the forgotten suburbs with a single mum living off the single parent pension. It’s the grief of scarcity, poverty, welfare dependence—a grief of there being no toilet paper, no future.