Memories of a terrible 2020 linger - but it wasn't all bad.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
There were moments - like when the rains came and the aerial firefighter thought, "Now, I'll be going home".
A refugee from war lay on the ultra-scan couch in Canberra Hospital to be told, "It's a girl" to join her five boys.
A doctor in the same hospital who worked through the epidemic was overjoyed when her twins were born to "complete my family".
The aerial firefighter
Captain Dan Montelli spent the fire season flying the giant Air Tanker 912 out from Canberra over the fires raging across the region.
His sweet moment was when the rains came. "It meant I could get home and see my wife and kids," he said. "The last month I was there in Canberra, all the rains came at once.
"The day previously, we had catastrophic fires and then, overnight, we had rain, so as a firefighter, seeing the rains come was my big moment of joy."
Captain Montelli lives in California so he alternates between fire seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres. The gap between them is shrinking so he was only home for two-and-a-half weeks before work began again.
He was amazed by the size of last summer's Australian fires. "Every time we took off, we were going to a different fire," he said from his home in the Napa Valley. "I've never seen anything like it. It was just one long year of firefighting."
He arrived in Australia on the day three of his fellow aerial firefighters died in a crash north-east of Cooma. Their C-130 tanker went into thick smoke on January 23 and hit the ground in the Snowy Monaro area.
Captain Montelli knew some of the men. He had had breakfast with them on a previous operation. "I can't put my feelings into words. You just don't want to think about that kind of thing," he said.
The refugee family
The Deng family lived for 17 years in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya before coming to Australia.
It was bleak but not as bleak as Sudan from which they fled as it descended into bloody anarchy. The father and mother, Malual and Dabora, met in the camp and four of their five boys were born there.
For them, Canberra is bliss.
The oldest boy, Deng, has just won a bursary to Marist College after he leaves Namadgi College after year 7. The $15,000 pays for sports gear, a laptop and all the school equipment the family could never have afforded.
The father, Malual, works as a labourer on construction sites. He gets a text at 5pm to tell him where he needs to be at 6am for work the next day. No text, no work.
The mother Dabora is overjoyed she is having a girl after five boys. Her moment of joy was when the nurse told her after the ultrasound scan.
"I was really happy," she said. "I was just lying down and they said it was a girl and I said, 'woooo'!"
But there were down moments, too. Malual follows the fortunes of his old village in South Sudan on Facebook. He saw a video of a gunfight on the earthen "streets". Tires were on fire. People were killed in a dispute between villagers and a powerful land-owner.
But Lalual didn't have enough money on his phone to make contact with his family so he raced around to the nearest petrol station to put the funds on the phone.
In the rush, he had a minor accident and that sent him into more distress.
But that anguish came and went. A daughter will be an eternal joy.
The doctors
Namita Mittal and her husband, Tarun Jain, are both doctors at Canberra Hospital. She is a pathologist and he is a radiologist, so they were in the front-line as the coronavirus was beaten back.
For them, the moment of joy was the birth of the twins on August 13.
"It was what I wanted," Dr Mittal said. "I wanted to complete my family."
But COVID-19 also coloured the joy. When their daughter was born 11 years ago, Dr Mittal's mother was there to support and help. But this time, the twins' grandmother was confined to India.
And the epidemic increased the tension around the pregnancy. "Being a health worker, I was going in to work so I was exposed to risk every day," Dr Mittal said.
On top of that, their 11-year-old daughter was working at home for some of the lockdown, and Dr Mittal was uneasy about so much screen-time.
"Kids are hooked up to their screens. There was so much connecting through Zoom. That was how they were socialising - playing games on screen. Chatting was on the screen," she said.
But now it is a complete family and Dr Mittal is overjoyed.
The politician
The Chief Minister of the ACT, Andrew Barr, led a party to victory in an election, and that was sweet for him.
But there were also bushfires, smoke, hailstones the size of cricket balls and then the epidemic. It was "bookended", as he put it, by his honeymoon before the multiple crises and the anniversary of the wedding a month or so ago.
All the same, dark clouds have silver linings. The lockdown gave him time to reflect. "It slowed the pace of life and I think that's a good thing," he said.
He escaped the endless formal events and functions which politicians must endure.
He thought the epidemic was life-changing for younger people. "There will be pre-COVID and after-COVID," he said.
"The ramifications will be there for the rest of their lives. There will be greater value on friends and family. It's been a sharp jolt to everyone's perception of what really matters in life."