Three months into this year and straight off the back of the most devastating bushfires to have engulfed Australia’s east coast, another crisis hit – this time it was of the pandemic kind.

Australia isn’t immune to a crisis. As a country, we were born dealing with the devastation of mother nature’s fury – bushfires, cyclones and drought, there is nothing generations of Australians haven’t endured or risen above.

And while there has been SARS and Swineflu, COVID has proven to be a different enemy of the State – it has held Australian’s under siege and fostered a level of panic and hysteria among Australians that raged out of control.

If toilet paper was the scientific tool used to measure panic levels and hysteria – then as a metric of measurement, it is the perfect barometer.

For all its simplicity and importance as a commodity, toilet paper painted a clear picture of our psychological state – never has a commodity manufactured in Australia become almost impossible to acquire.

And as Australia’s state of panic peaked, supermarket shelves accentuated an even more interesting picture.

Dealing with COVID and preventing its spread has meant Australians have had to make drastic changes to their lives and habits – a paradigm shift that has caused us to re-think everything they do, how they do it and where.

Offices and cities like Melbourne’s CBD, became ghost towns. Work from home edicts were issued and telecommuting, the once talked about new work order, but never adopted, was suddenly thrust upon hundreds of thousands of Australian workers.

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