“Pretty bad,” he said of their attempts. “They’d tried to cut their hair with scissors and made holes in their hair.”
At Fairfield,the suburb that became the epicentre of COVID-19 early in the Delta outbreak,Assyrian singer Gaggi Atoraya – jokingly described by his friends as the “Al Capone of Fairfield” – resumed his seat at his local cafe with mates he has not seen in months.
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Mr Atoraya summed up the mood among his group on Monday afternoon:“We’ve come back again together and we are happy because we are all friends,we are together,we haven’t seen each other for a while. Now we are sitting together and talking together,it’s good.”
Across Sydney,morning road traffic surged by 17 per cent compared to the first day of lockdown back in June. In Bondi,where the COVID-19 transmission that began Sydney’s Delta outbreak took place,sections of the Westfield car park reached capacity for the first time in months.
As retailers reopened,some queued for summer fashions and others for bigger sizes to account for lockdown indulgences.
“I really need to be wearing activewear because I didn’t stay at the gym,” Racquel Garwood explained as she reached the front of the queue at designer activewear retailer Lululemon.
Music thudded from the middle level of Westfield Bondi Junction. Staff greeted one another like old friends. A cleaner carrying a mop looked like he was itching to give somebody a hug. “Bit of a difference,” he said. “Yesterday depressing,today jungle. But it’s better like this.”
Sera Ozbey,the Pattison’s franchisee,considered what to write on the daily specials blackboard before the doors opened to shoppers and decided to go for something different.
She chose a pink chalk and wrote,“Welcome back Sydney”. “We’re so happy to see everyone’s faces,” she said. “Everyone is smiling – you can’t see through the masks,but there’s a glow. Everyone is so happy to be out and with each other. It’s just been so long.”
Customers waited at the doors of 24-hour Kmart stores to begin browsing at 12am,while fabric shop Spotlight also traded through the night to mark the occasion. Midnight also brought queues of pundits to pokies at clubs such as City Tattersalls and Wests Ashfield.
Former premier Gladys Berejiklian did not want to describe the first stage of the city’s return to life on Monday as “Freedom Day”,but that did not stop gym owner Joel Baur from putting George Michael’s songFreedom on repeat as he celebrated opening his studio. “It’s been a hard couple of months,” he said.
New Premier Dominic Perrottet,however,had no objections to the f-word. “NSW,you’ve earned it. Enjoy it,” he said,as he sipped what one of his colleagues called a “freedom frothy” at a pub in Moore Park.
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Working parents,however,looked at his pub visit with envy as they continued to home school their children. Until children were safe back at school,said Georgie Dent,executive director of The Parenthood,“the day-to-day reality for working parents of school-aged children is not going to be dramatically different”.
The youngest and oldest students return to school next week,followed by other years on October 25. Most parents are following government requests to keep children at home,with between 94 and 95 per cent learning from home last week,which fell to 93 per cent on Monday.
With Natassia Chrysanthos,Anna Patty,Jenny Noyes and Mary Ward and Michael Koziol
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