CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

As the Australian public and government rapidly reacquaint themselves with the importance of science and organisations like the CSIRO – thousands of our greatest minds continue to run trial and errors tests on possible vaccinations and cures for the COVID-19 virus.

After decades of stripping resources from science in an effort to silence any grave warnings about future health and environmental catastrophes – both our conservative politicians and commentators are now eagerly waiting for the underfunded experts to tell us when it is okay to go outside again.

In one research station on the outskirts of Betoota, our town’s scientists have been pulling 20 hours shifts and have done for two months now.

Dr Natalie Lui is one of these overworked minds who is burning the midnight oil trying to find Australia’s way out of the COVID-19 pandemic using the unlikely tool of brain power.

“Ahhh shit” says Natalie, as she drops some sort of sciency fluid underneath a sciency microscope.

“It’s hard to feel like the public really appreciate the hard work we are doing here”

As Natalie goes on to explain, a lot of scientists feel like the endless caffeine-charged nights that they are putting in to solving this global health emergency will be forgotten in the annals of history”

“It’s not just that I’ve spent the last three decades of my career being told I’m smug and hate Australia” she says.

“It’s not because I earn less than a second hand car salesman’s personal assistant’

“It’s not because I haven’t seen my family since the wild animal market incident. It’s more than that.

“It’s because people think religion is responsible for what happens here”

Natalie says while the occasional ABC news story might make her colleagues feel like everyone is getting a good look at how hard and how fast they’ve had to work to create some sort of antibody that will protect the future of the human race – she knows at the end of the day, any miracle that science comes up with is likely going to be attributed to a illiterate Palestinian peasant from thousands of years ago.

“They better not thank God for this” she mutters, before taking a quick break to check her Digimon.

“There’s no holy water here. Just caffeine and very limited funding”

“But I ‘spose giving all the praise to Jesus Christ is better than the government taking credit for it.”

“There’s a reason we are using tea saucers for petri dishes in this lab”