I've written before about the struggles of calling two countries home, but being separated from family and friends for the birth of a child during a global pandemic is a new struggle.

We were in Sweden when the virus hit Europe. I was a few months pregnant and we didn't want to risk travelling during a pandemic when we had a safe alternative. This was in line with the Australian government's advice to those with housing and a job: to stay put.

As the year wore on, we moved in and out of self-imposed isolation due to Sweden's monstrous number of cases and deaths. I was getting more and more pregnant and struggled with the uncertainty about when I would be able to return to Australia.

My mum Sylvia had planned to come and stay with us for a couple of months around the birth but as I neared my due date it became clear that wouldn't be happening.

I comforted myself with the idea that we could come home after a few months. The government might not let citizens out of the country, but surely it couldn't ban them from coming home, I reasoned.

Of course, there is no ban, but the reality of weekly international flight caps, expensive hotel quarantine and unaffordable, almost unattainable flights are the practical equivalent.

Booking a business class ticket is no guarantee of actually sitting on the plane but it's as close as you can get if you're not lucky enough to secure a seat on one of the few government-arranged commercial flights. For our family, this would cost at least $15,000 one way.

Even if we could get back, we'd face hotel quarantine at the other end. Two weeks in what could be no fresh air, with terrible food and even a chance of catching the virus from within the facility. For this, we'd be paying around $4500.

People are losing their jobs as industries implode under the weight of the pandemic. International visas are expiring and unable to be renewed. Australian temporary and permanent residencies need to be activated by a certain date. Loved ones are dying or in need of care and support.

Even for those of us in relatively comfortable positions, the uncertainty takes a huge mental and emotional toll.

From virus-ravaged Sweden, it's frustrating to read about international students, fruit-pickers and cricket teams being fast-tracked. Of ex-politicians being whisked all over Europe on government jets.

I'm one of the lucky ones; I'm homesick, not homeless.

Writing this article was a flurry of electronic communication, trying to find time and emotional energy to reply to the hundreds of messages I received from people in all sorts of situations ranging from inconvenient and stressful to vulnerable and traumatic.

Most were a combination.

The biggest challenge in writing this piece was simply choosing whose accounts to include from a virtual sea of sad stories.

Grant Dansie lives in Oslo with his Norwegian wife, five-year-old son and twin one-year-old daughters.

Grant's father murdered his mother in 2017 and was finally convicted and sentenced late last year. His appeal was rejected last month.

With the appeals process over, Dansie wants to go home to Adelaide and lay his mother to rest "in a dignified manner."

Given the current situation, he said it seemed impossible.

Unable to afford a business class ticket, his risk of being bumped from flights is overwhelming and he doesn't have the money for expensive quarantine on the other side.

He also said he wouldn't put his young family through the stress of two weeks in hotel quarantine.

Madeline Andrae arrived in London, England, from Mount Gambier, South Australia, on February 29, just over two weeks ahead of the UK's first lockdown.

"Just before I left there was obviously some talk of Covid but nothing serious," she says. "We know how quickly it escalated!"

She started working almost immediately on March 2 as a radiation therapist and contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for advice when things got serious with the virus.

She was told to stay put as long as she had a job and housing.

The lockdown caused her flatmates to move home, leaving her alone for over five months. With only two acquaintances in the whole country, she said the lockdown was "extremely tough," with no physical contact of any kind for over nine weeks.

"As we came out of that lockdown, I was extremely low," she says. Due to the circumstances, she had not made any friends.

"At that point I desperately wanted to come home. I remember crying hysterically outside of work one day on the phone to Mum and Dad telling them I needed to get on a plane that night," she says. "The next flight available was in few weeks and cost over $5000."

The homeward journey would have cost her around $10,000 including quarantine and other expenses.

"I was also not in a place mentally to be able to complete hotel quarantine. I still am not."

She said the attitude and comments from the Australian people and government gave her mixed feelings about her home.

"Someone had written, 'I hope you get Coronavirus and die,' another, 'You're not welcome here. You thought you were too good for Australia, so you deserve this.'

After working on the front line all year, she says she felt Australia should be proud of her. Instead, she felt "vilified and alone."

Ella Lu Benn and her family live in rural Mongolia. Their long-term plan to return to Sydney, at the end of 2020 for around six months doesn't seem likely.

The plan was to bring their 18-year-old son back to Australia and help him settle into university and to attend their eldest son's January wedding.

She says Mongolia had been locked down for most of the year with very few flights leaving the country.

They have not been permitted to board available flights due to Australia's flight caps.

"We were assured by the Australian embassy back in July, when we asked if we should be trying to get out of the country, that there would be monthly trips back to Australia and not to worry," she says. "So we didn't.

"Then our application to be on the only flight to Australia in September was rejected due to the full quota."

There have been no further opportunities to get home, but the family have purchased tickets on a flight scheduled for late December and are hoping all goes well.

Terri Mercieca's father has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.

She and her partner are trying desperately to get back to Orange, NSW, from London, to be with him, having just paid $9000 to land on Christmas Day.

She says her father was given four months to live in October.

"By the time I see him he will have a month or so left if we make it," she says.

"We've had two flights cancelled. It's a mess."

She's withdrawn all the superannuation available to her and launched a GoFundMe campaign so family and friends can help them avoid "excruciating debt".

Naomi Nguyen was teaching in Spain when it locked down in March, three days before Australian authorities called for citizens without security to come home.

After nine weeks of lockdown she tried unsuccessfully to get home.

Flights were unaffordable, cancelled, or both.

She spent the many months after isolation finishing her university studies from her laptop on friends' couches between Portugal, Greece, England and Germany - wherever she was offered a safe place to live.

The time difference saw her logging in for classes starting between midnight to three o'clock in the morning with some not finishing until seven.

Of the five flights she booked, one finally got her home in October.

Jade Gambrill of Newcastle was planning to come home in March from Canada to visit her family, including her grandmother who suffers from Parkinson's Disease and grandfather who was sick in hospital at the time.

She called off the trip about a week before lockdown, worried she might be separated from her fiancé, Antony Dickenson, long term.

The couple had planned to move to Australia in June but with stable jobs and housing in Canada they postponed until things settled down, wanting to avoid the possibility of quitting jobs, selling furniture, and breaking their lease only to be bumped from their flight and end up homeless and unemployed.

Gambrill, like so many others, has missed important family milestones and gone without the support of her parents during distressing times.

"I am working in the ICU here in Edmonton where we are now so stretched that we are shoving two patients and all their equipment into one room, which is unsafe and extremely heartbreaking," she says.

"I am having to deal with dying patients whose families cannot come to say goodbye or hold their hand while they pass, as either the patient or the family has COVID.

"It has been an extremely stressful and trying year."

They have tickets booked in March 2021 but know they can't rely on their new plans going ahead.

Dr Alyse Brown and her partner Geoffrey O'Connell are from Melbourne, and planned to move back when Brown's contract ended in August after living and working in the UK for 18 months.

After being bumped from their first flight, they realised their chances of actually boarding a plane and landing in Australia were slim.

"We took heed of all of the stories from Australians failing to get home and shifted gears into trying to shore ourselves up in England for a little while longer till the path home was made a bit easier again," she says.

Brown managed to get an extension on her contract, and Geoffrey was forced to ask for his job back on what was supposed to be his last day of work, which he was granted.

"We are not a story that will bring tears to anyone's eyes," Brown says, "but we are on borrowed time like many Australians stuck overseas. We all have our end dates."

She said they had revised their plan to get back to Australia by March but that the repatriation options were prohibitively expensive and had the added drawback of only 10 days' notice in which to quit jobs, end their lease, pack their house and sell their things.

"I'm so frustrated that the time I was able to buy with a six-month contract extension to wait for the government to sort itself out will likely have made no difference to my ability to get home," Brown says.

Her visa is linked inextricably to her job, meaning once the contract ends, so will her visa.

"My plan is literally to send a "Send All" email out to my workplace asking if anyone can take us in," she says.

"Currently the Australian government is running a system that demands you hit rock bottom before they lift a finger."

Stephanie Weaving has worked as a master's prepared nurse educator in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates for over five years, but her visa and health insurance expire this month, and she wants to come home with her family.

Her husband, Diaa Besiso, lost his job as airline cabin crew due to the pandemic. They have a two-year-old son, Elias.

"2020 was meant to be the 'Year of the Nurse', a celebration of our profession, instead we got COVID-19," Weaving says.

"I have been living through utter chaos, provided with subpar PPE, and all the emotions of dealing with the frontline of this pandemic."

Weaving has already secured Australian employment: a position at Bendigo Health as a Transition Programs Nurse Educator to start in December but can't get back to begin the job.

After two cancellations already, there are no listed flights until April 2021 and the family are living in a small apartment with friends, having sold their belongings and returned the keys to their home.

Their suitcases sit packed at the foot of their bed, waiting for the day they get the chance to hop on a plane.

James Cater of Shoalhaven Heads and his girlfriend, Anna, went to Russia early this year to help Anna's mother renovate her retirement apartment.

"Almost as soon as we arrived things started to lock down," Cater says.

Around the same time that Australia told citizens overseas to stay put if they were safe and secure, Russia closed its borders.

"While I briefly considered flying home, I was stuck with an impossible choice - if I left Anna, I would have no idea when I would be able to see her again," he says.

"The Russian government had already extended my visa which was due to expire in June, so I decided to stick it out."

Cater eventually booked a flight home in July when cases were lower and flights more affordable, but NSW arrival caps were announced a week after he bought the ticket.

That was the first of four cancelled flights he has booked back to Sydney.

"I'm not in the worst of circumstances. I am incredibly grateful that I'm getting to spend this time with Anna, rather than being indefinitely stranded away from her in Australia," he says.

"However, it's taken its toll financially and on my mental state."

Unable to speak Russian and without a valid driver's license, life in Russia is hard.

Cater says there were days he felt completely useless.

"I also miss my family," he says, "especially my dad who's 72, lives alone, and probably doesn't have many years left."

"The Australian government has completely abandoned me," he says.

He said the government had framed stranded Australians as being selfish and simply wanting to extend holidays but said his predicament was far from a holiday, describing the year as "psychological and physical torment."

With his extension visa due to expire on February 7 and no available flights out of Russia within his budget, Cater risks overstaying his visa and said he feels "nihilistic" about his situation.

"I don't know what else to do but wait and write angry letters, appear on radio, TV and newspapers," he says.

"I have filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission but still haven't heard anything back from them.

"Our only hope is for public opinion to change and appealing to the better nature of all Australians."

This story is exclusive to ACM.