f Covid-19 has done one thing, it has made people think about who, really, is an “essential” worker. A hedge fund manager or a nurse? An advertising executive or a teacher? A supermarket checkout person, risking their health to ensure people have food and supplies? A cleaner, late at night disinfecting a train, top to toe, to ensure as much as possible that commuters won’t pick up coronavirus by touching a handrail or stop button. Fawad is 33, a Pakistani migrant, and it’s his job to clean Melbourne’s metro trains. We meet at the Craigieburn train maintenance facility, way out in the northern suburbs, a huge brightly lit expanse where trains come to be cleaned and serviced after hours. Fawad arrived in Australia as a foreign student in 2012 to study information systems at university, but he couldn’t find a job in his area of expertise. For the last six years he’s cleaned trains and now supervises others doing the same. The job of cleaning is attracting renewed respect. Hand sanitisers greet every restaurant or cafe-goer and tables and chairs are cleaned after each customer. Re-opened workplaces have new routines. Schools with a coronavirus case are shut until they are thoroughly cleaned. Public transport, once overcrowded with strangers, is susceptible to the spread of infection and every network in the country has substantially upgraded its cleaning. Melbourne’s mantra is “every train, every night”. Each train carriage – there are 1,200 of them – is scrubbed nightly in a facility like Craigieburn. Pre-coronavirus, the windows were wiped with an ammonia substance, and the doors and handrails with a soap solution. Now, everything is disinfected. The windows, the floors, the railings, all by hand. At the end of the process, cleaners don a mask and spray the whole carriage with disinfectant, walking backwards. The disinfectant settles over every surface, drying in place. Fawad (he goes by one name) works from 8pm to 2am, sometimes at the Craigieburn facility, then moving on to others. If a train is really filthy, he’ll work till 3am or 3.30am, falling into bed and waking at 11am. He has a son, 14 months old, and “lockdown” for him was playing with his baby and helping his wife, Seema. He has a renewed sense that his work is important. “Before, we had a sense, but now we have more duty because the customers are going into trains, we need to take care of them,” he says. “We need to take care of the workers too. Like if we are not disinfecting the trains, maybe someone get the coronavirus. We would say that we are responsible for this.” ‘We are feeling safer’ Mick Rowe’s title is train presentation officer and for more than 40 years, he has been involved in cleaning trains. Coronavirus meant everything was re-thought. His department had three days to negotiate with private cleaning contractors Transclean to shift practices to ensure trains were as Covid-safe as possible. Cleaning three carriages now takes about 50 minutes, up from around 30 minutes before. Disinfectant was in short supply at first but now it’s steady. Rowe, 57, has a strengthened purpose too. “Many years ago [people would say] ‘he’s only a cleaner’…. now people have realised how important cleaning is.” Travel by public transport collapsed during the lockdown in March and April, and is now slowly resuming, although in Victoria workers are encouraged to work from home if they can. Last week patronage was at 18% of normal levels. In NSW, there will be a doubling of capacity from 1 July, allowing 68 people per carriage on a Waratah train, for instance, and 23 passengers on a two-door bus – up from 12. Victoria has no passenger limits, but as patronage increases, social distancing becomes more difficult. With community transmission of coronavirus low, people are beginning to feel confident to meet in restaurants and travel on public transport, although there is an expectation that car travel will increase, at least in the short-term. Fawad’s job is to ensure people feel as confident as possible on trains. He says that prior to the pandemic, Transclean employed 86 people to clean the metro trains; now it’s 150. To date, no cleaner or Metro staff worker has contracted Covid-19. “Before, we were thinking about this thing, but like now you’re used to it. The trains are getting cleaned [and] we are feeling safer.” Much of the job is the same as it has ever been – picking up discarded trash, disposable coffee cups, McDonald’s wrappers, lost property. Coronavirus is invisible, and it’s the tangible rubbish that takes the most time. Sometimes trains arrive at Craigieburn vandalised or covered with graffiti. The hardest thing, Fawad says, are the drunks who vomit or urinate on trains, especially on the weekend. It’s hard work, and cold in the winter. “It is a challenge, he says. “Every night you get something new. Sometimes it is clean, but sometimes it’s like so filthy … [sometimes] a train takes two and a half hours to clean.” Fawad hopes one day to get work in his field but says he enjoys the work on the trains. He feels for foreign students, unable to qualify for coronavirus government benefits but struggling to find work. Cleaning is at least a growth area, and some have found work scrubbing the trains. He knows people are nervous about crowds as they emerge into the world. People are advised not to travel on public transport if they have cold or flu symptoms and to keep a distance from others if they can. But the trains have never been so clean, he says, and people can feel confident of at least that. “They should feel safe,” he says. Postcards from the pandemic looks at how everyday Australians are coping with immense changes coronavirus has brought to their lives.