2021: a year of heroes (and the odd villain)

Australians behaved pretty well in 2021. We weren't perfect, but we were better than most. The loonier conspiracy theories didn't take much of a hold. We masked up and we vaxxed up. We kept our distance. Mostly.

Contrary to the fashion for gloom and doom, Australia remains a great and (mostly) sensible place in which to live. Democracy is not under serious threat here, as it is in parts of Europe and even in the United States (not that it ever got started in China and Russia).

It's true that politics is polarised (but there never was some rosy age when it wasn't), and it's not so entrenched in left and right bunkers that the looming election is a foregone conclusion. Votes change. Seats swing. Ministers are shoved off the back seats of the shiny black limos.

Just contrast Australians' behaviour over the past year with that of Americans or Brits.

The US went mad(der). Mask-wearing and vaccination became a political issue. Republicans saw both as a mark of Big Government bordering on socialism.

Britain did its best to fall apart. Its Prime Minister's (dis)approval ratings tumbled as more and more revelations emerged of people around him partying while ordinary people locked themselves away under instruction from the very same politicians.

But Australia (despite what you might think) kept reasonably reasonable.

So the first candidates for Heroes of the Year are ourselves. We win no prizes, but we may bask in the satisfaction of knowing that, by and large, we stuck together in the middle of once unimaginable adversity. Compared with others, we remained a coherent society.

And among us, the real giants are the unknown heroes - the people who did the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. They aren't celebrities except to the people who know them.

A few come to mind. When Luke Ferguson was chosen as the ACT's Local Hero for 2022, he was pretty well speechless - except for saying, almost in tears, "I love my job." His job is to help kids with disabilities. He enthuses them, and they enthuse him.

Or the NSW Local Hero, Shanna Whan, a recovered alcoholic who devotes her energy to changing the culture surrounding alcohol in rural areas. Anyone who defeats her own demons is a hero.

All those health workers are clearly candidates, too. Everyone from the cleaners of wards to the deliverers of linen to the doctors and nurses.

We include the health officers of the territories, states and Commonwealth. This pandemic is like a roaring monster which shifts its shape and direction, but the health officers and their staff kept their heads.

It's been quite a monster. On December 31, 2020, we thought it was fierce - but the figures were a fraction of today's, despite all the heroic effort.

A year ago, there were 184 active cases across Australia (one in the ACT, 134 in NSW, 10 in Victoria, 10 in Queensland, 0 in Tasmania, 13 in WA and 18 in SA).

One year on, there are 72,203 active cases and rising (688 in the ACT, 48,553 in NSW, 16,467 in Victoria, 2147 in Queensland, 198 in Tasmania, 20 in WA and 3974 in SA).

But the rising figures mask real progress. A year ago, contracting COVID looked like a potential death sentence. Now, not so much (except for the unvaccinated).

Which brings us to the undoubted heroes of our time: scientists who developed vaccines faster than we dreamed was possible.

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When the pandemic struck in 2019, anybody who knew anything about vaccines said it took 10 years to develop a new one. And yet, in the space of just over a year, we were rolling up our sleeves.

So the heroes of our time are the people who gave us this salvation. Their great symbolic moment came at the Wimbledon tennis championship, when the crowd gave the Oxford University scientist behind AstraZeneca's vaccine a long standing ovation.

There Dame Sarah Gilbert sat, uncertain what to do, the antithesis of our age of empty celebrity. She seemed like a nocturnal animal pushed into the blinding sun.

Contrast her modesty with the brazen, bare-faced anti-vaxxers in Melbourne and Sydney who seemed proud of their ignorance.

"Health can not be injected" read one slogan in Melbourne.

Well, it can actually. Dame Sarah Gilbert and the other scientists who brought us the means to inject protection are the heroes of 2021.

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