Australians all let us deJoyce

I'll begin to explain my beguiling stage metaphor by reporting that I have been moved to invent a useful new word: deJoyced.

It labels the way in which the nation's public conversation (substantially but not entirely made up of who and what dominates the news media) has been wondrously changed during this Coronavirus horror.

Suddenly, partisan party politics and that genre's most superfluous Barnaby Joyceian gibberers are much overshadowed. We are focused on more momentous things (Covid-19 and its accompanying themes of Life, Death and Social Ruin) and so are paying much media attention to accomplished people who have worthwhile things to say on those great big subjects.

"Experts", people with fully-cocked minds are displacing so many of those (especially politicians) who go off half-cocked.

They, the properly-cocked (cluey immunologists, epidemiologists, chief health officers, economists divining the Covidian impacts on the economy, and well-informed others) are the new actors on our stage.

It may be unfair of me to graft Barnaby Joyce's famous name into my new word. He is only one of a thousand politico-celebrity gibberers we are suddenly hearing almost nothing of. But in this instance Barnaby's name is a godsend for the amateur etymologist. To call this process deJoyceing somehow captures the delight it is giving.

Australians all as one rejoiced/ To see their public life deJoyced

Stars of this new, deJoyced Australia have been born, figures such as ever-present Chief Medical Officer Professor Brendan Murphy, the ABC's blessedly-ubiquitous Dr Norman Swan and a whole cast of the medically, socially, economically, academically cluey.

For example the ABC Radio National morning news and current affairs program Breakfast that sets the day's news tone for lots of us tone is now almost wholly deJoyced. Till now the program has always suffered from the fact that its anchorwoman Fran Kelly is so very obsessed with federal party politics that there is nothing any politician ever says or does that she finds too trivial to be bothered with. Now, though, with so much of the usual ideology shelved, she and her show's hoplites have nimbly adjusted to the grown up interviewing of grown ups.

The ABC's Dr Norman Swan (surely now destined to one day be the grateful nation's Governor-General) has been a distinguished taker-upper of some of the media time normally squandered on gibberers.

Perhaps it is just me (I am half Scottish, and know it is my genetically better half) but I find the engaging Dr Swan's overt Scottishness (his voice has a pleasingly bagpipey skirl about it) reassuring in these unhappy times. The Scots, beginning with the Scottish Enlightenment, have always punched far above their weight in philosophy, political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, botany and zoology, law, agriculture, chemistry, poetry and everything. Australia needs a cerebral Scot and Dr Swan is just what the doctor ordered.

I am not saying that there is necessarily anything ideal about this present maturing of the Australian public conversation (perhaps a Joyceian gibber-hubbub of partisan politicking is exactly the racket a healthy democracy should make), only that it is another element of the weirdness that is gripping us.

And while on that weirdness, after doing so much shy grumbling about my Canberra suburb surely being the most lifeless and uneventful place on Earth (its branch of Neighbourhood Watch having nothing to watch, its birdlife, bored guanoless, moving to other suburbs in search of some stimulus) suddenly a field hospital (a field hospital!) is being feverishly erected on the suburb's oval.

It is to be a dedicated coronavirus field hospital to bustle into action when and if there is a surge of Covid-19 victims.

But a field hospital of all things, and at a spot where dogs once romped and kiddies flew kites.

Those who know a little history will find the words "field hospital" giving off a distinctive buzz. Field hospitals arose on the margins of history's great battles. In very recent times there have been poignant archaeological unearthings at an American Civil War field hospital site in Virginia. Artefacts include bones of the wounded, expertly sawn by busy field surgeons.

Then, just last year, new searchings at a site of a field hospital juxtaposed with the 1815 Battle of Waterloo (today the site is an orchard not far from Brussels) yielded a pit of amputated bones, a French cannonball and other poignant artefacts.

The poignancy of field hospitals is all to do with their ghostly evanescence. They are temporary and then, even though while they were in use they were the most terribly real and present of places, they are gone.

Will historians hundreds of years hence find puzzling references (perhaps in ye olde newspaper columns written by unreliable journalists) to a Garran Oval field hospital and wonder, since there is no trace of it, if it is just a figment of federal capital folklore?