The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Besha Rodell, a columnist with the Australia bureau.

Every couple of days for the past few weeks, I have clambered onto my roof from the small patio on our second floor. I hoist up a pillow, our pet parrot Chobi in his cage, and a couple of beers or a glass of wine. Then I peer over the lip of the roof, and into the backyard of the house across the alleyway, where a friendly face is waiting.

My friend Brooke has lived in the house across the lane from our townhouse for over a year, and we rely on one another for normal neighborly things like borrowed ingredients and reciprocal pet feeding when one of us is out of town. But since coronavirus has made us all prisoners in our own homes, we have been holding regular catch-ups across the laneway, me from my roof and her from her backyard.

I call this “isolation happy hour.”

Before Victoria went into stage three lockdown, barring people from leaving home for anything but the most necessary activities, my brother and his partner would walk over from their home a few blocks away and set up lawn chairs in the alley, far enough from me on the roof and Brooke in her backyard to maintain appropriate distance, but close enough so that we could feel some sense of communion. That option is gone now, but Brooke is still there when I need her, and vice versa.

Apart from the obvious fear, anxiety and disruption, the thing that has struck me the most about the current crisis is the resourcefulness of our attempts to remain responsibly connected.