Pandemic daze: From causal to casual

When the Australian of the Year was announced in January 2024, the two eminent melanoma specialists jointly awarded the country’s top annual tribute snapped the public’s patriotic reverie with a sobering corrective. Aware they were beaming into lounge rooms across the country, professors Georgina Long and Richard Scolyer, the latter afflicted with terminal brain cancer, used their pinnacle moment of good-vibes television to deliver an uncompromising reality check to a public wilfully defying a mortal risk: ‘Tomorrow, [Australia Day] thousands of Aussies will be on the beaches, working on their tans, or as we see it, brewing their melanomas’, Long said: A tan is skin cells in trauma in response to over-exposure to UV radiation from the sun. There is nothing healthy about a tan, nothing. Our bronzed Aussie culture is actually killing us. (Long, 2024)