The four Melbourne teens surviving a night adrift on Port Phillip Bay have provided a little piece of tinsel for the nation’s 2022 Christmas tree.
Just imagine the fear as their paddle boards took on a direction of their own and night made an unwelcome visit. Imagine the 12 hours their parents had to endure, before being delivered a Christmas miracle they will never forget.
Maybe it’s because the teens are a similar age to my own. Or that they were celebrating the end of school, like mine. But that tiny piece of news came at the end of a week when the nation’s heart broke for the families of two Queensland police officers, not much older, gunned down while doing their job.
And news of the paddleboard kids’ survival was just so, so good.
This year, 2022, has written a thousand bad headlines. Murder and mayhem. Death and destruction. COVID and corruption.
But perhaps there’s value in finding the tinsel amongst the bad baubles this Christmas; the good stories that sometimes are drowned out by the bad.
On the world stage, the war in Ukraine continues to break our hearts. But it has also lifted onto the world stage a new leader for our time: Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the 44-year-old former comedian and actor who is as bold as he is courageous.
In the United Kingdom, the rapid change of prime ministers created a recipe for chaos, but it also delivered the first British Asian person to hold the office.
Despite her advanced years, the Queen’s death has been felt terribly across the Commonwealth, and in many of our homes too, but it has also pulled a nation together at a time when it needed it most.
Mass shootings continue to dominate the United States landscape and yes, we might have to wait another year to find out whether we can find a shred of tinsel in the talks that grow slightly louder with each tragedy, about curtailing US gun ownership.
Closer to home, heartbreak writ large. But even then, if you look for a Christmas miracle – a tiny piece of tinsel – you’ll find it.
A legend lost
The premature death of cricketing legend Shane Warne is unfathomable. But when our swimmers took to the pool to steal all the gold they could at the Commonwealth Games, it was sportsmanship like his that we talked about. A legend on and off the field.
Brittany Higgins, Grace Tame and Chanel Contos might all argue this was an annus horribilis. But the tinsel they’ve brought is in the talks we are having with our teenage sons and daughters. What’s right and what’s wrong. What consent means and what it doesn’t. How coercive control can wear many disguises.
And that has been delivered by three young women we all owe the gift of respect this Christmas.
The list of distress and devastation goes on. But so do the gift-wrapped lessons they deliver.
Indeed, our year started with Novak Djokovic having his visa cancelled for not presenting evidence of COVID vaccination. But the Australian Open ended with Ash Barty taking out the women’s title – the first Aussie to do that since 1978.
COVID stamped its authority early, with deaths topping 2500 by January. But it has taught us to do things differently. Connection is trendy again. And in tiny communities the length and breadth of our nation, we bandied together to help each other.
As 2022 closes we are living with a pandemic we might have feared would beat us. It didn’t come close. And it won’t. That’s a piece of tinsel worth putting right up the top of the tree, near the shiny star.
Federal politics was disrupted, too. Scomo gave way to Albo, the first Italian-Australian to move into The Lodge. But perhaps even bigger was the colour teal, and how it’s muting the institutional red and blue that has run politics for so long.
Finally, Australia will get an anti-corruption commission. The royal commission into Robodebt will provide a template for that to never happen again. That’s worth celebrating.
Floods destroyed too many lives in too many states, breaking banks and hearts. But stories of human triumph again rose to the surface. The role of first responders; the role our our neighbours; the role of those who look out for others.
Heroes to inspire us all
I could go on, but there’s a cap to the tinsel any Christmas tree should wear.
Perhaps this Christmas we could take our lead from Constable Rachel McCrow, one of the young police officers recently murdered in Queensland.
Her friend, at the full police funeral she shared with Constable Matthew Arnold, told the world that Rachel had the “purest of souls and the warmest of hearts’’. She could always find the good even when hidden in the bad.
That’s hard to fathom right now. But perhaps the Christmas miracle we can hope for is that her family, and the family of Matt Arnold, find peace this Christmas Day, knowing the gift of service their daughter and son, sister and brother have given to the nation.
May this festive season, however you celebrate it, be peaceful, too. Be reckless with the tinsel.
