by Fiona Wright
All of this is simply to say: it was expensive, and it was exhausting, even as it was an incredibly emotional experience. The morning I handed the keys to the old house back to the agent, I walked one more time through its empty, clinically clean rooms, pausing especially in that back sunroom, I felt my body resonate within it. Most of all, I thought of the afternoon that I’d first moved in, drinking a glass of sweet champagne whilst sitting on the kitchen counter alongside the two women I’d soon be living here with, the two women I would grow to love, how silly, but also supportive, we would all be here together. The agent put the keys in a yellow envelope and didn’t say a word and it took me several seconds to realise that there was nothing else to do but walk away. One of my current housemates, when I mentioned how strange this felt, shrugged her shoulders and said, I don’t get attached to houses any more.
I’m still not sure that I believe her.
The first house that I moved in to, when I left my family home, was one of those share houses that had been a share house for longer than anyone actually living there really knew. There was a cupboard in the back room full of odd objects – a tray of melted candles, a deflated basketball, two electric fans – that didn’t seem to belong to anyone but that no-one was willing to throw out in case they did, there were old bed sheets painted with slogans pushed behind the couch, a toy bat hanging from the ceiling light in the kitchen. My own room was small, with pink wallpaper and a scabby metal rail to hang my clothes along attached to the back wall. My furniture was the same furniture I’d had in my bedroom as a child – single bed, desk, narrow bookcase. My window overlooked our small backyard, the alleyway lined with bins, dumped furniture and milk-sap weeds, the kind that make me itchy if I try to uproot them and seem endemic to the inner west. The house was in terrible condition – the balcony lattice was rotten, the kitchen blotchy with rust, my bedroom windows friable. But I was thrilled to be living there, with other young people, close to the pubs where we’d play bingo or trivia on mid-week evenings, or drink as many bright-blue cocktails as we could in the space of a Friday Happy Hour-and-a-half; close too to a number of other share houses that we’d wander in and out of, planning barbecues or frisbee matches in the nearby park together, and going out for cooked breakfasts in the café near the station that always seemed able to squeeze in one more chair.
Still, it was an adjustment – I remember the first weekend that I lived there, lying on my single bed on a late afternoon, restless and anxious and vaguely bored, realising that there was no one home in the house that I could chat to, that I knew no one in the area, had no idea where any of my housemates actually were, that if something were to happen to me, if I were to disappear, I couldn’t know how long it might take for somebody to notice. I cooked big dinners in the first week, hoping to share them (without mentioning them to my housemates, who all had other plans). One evening I turned around from walking to the gym because I ran into one of them coming home and thought we might hang out (he seemed bewildered by this action). It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when I was talking to my grandma about my move and she asked me if I cooked in my bedroom and if I had my own TV that I realised it made sense that I didn’t know the proprieties of share-housing: I was, I am, the first person in my family to ever live this way, to make my home in a temporary space and with strangers. In the year that I was there, four new housemates cycled through the place: two of the women left after one of our male housemates slept with them both; one of the men left to travel, another after some kind of dispute I never really understood. But even still I learned here a kind of living, a kind of community, that is different from a family – more independent, more loosely bound, but no less connected or intimate or kind.
After the rent increases in that house became ridiculous I moved to another, newer and barer, where we sourced most of our furniture from the street, a washing machine from my cousin’s friend. We stole our glassware, piece by piece, from nearby pubs, tucking it into our handbags as we finished our drinks.
I mention this because it wasn’t until I moved again, into my third house, that I began to think less temporarily about my home. In part, this was because I met my best friend at this time, a wonderfully practical and generous woman, who has also always taken great joy in making her home. Laura’s family is Dutch, and that language has a word, gezellig, not quite translatable, for a kind of hearty cosiness, enclosed and comfortable, that seems to run right through her blood. Shortly after I moved, Laura did too – to escape a difficult housemate – and she took me with her to op shops, to Reverse Garbage, to the homes of strangers she’d encountered via eBay and Freecycle, the places she was using to fit out her house, to find what she called ‘solutions’ – storage solutions, kitchen solutions, wardrobe solutions – to amend its unhelpful quirks. It was a revelation to me, to see her settling so firmly into place, adapting her space to suit her needs, sourcing furniture that she might not need forever to make herself more comfortable, for now. In part, I know this kind of thing had not occurred to me before because I was only just coming back from the height of my illness, where frugality had always made more sense to me than comfort, where cosiness I still saw as self-indulgent, a luxury not meant for me. The first time I lay on Laura’s new bed – she’d bought herself a new mattress, a downy underlay, picked up some soft flannel sheets from the huge Salvos at Tempe – I almost cried for how good it felt against my angular and aching body. But I know I also thought then – seven years ago, I realise now – that I would save my home-making until I had a place that was permanent, that was my own: there didn’t seem to be a point in having proper furniture, good kitchenware, storage solutions, until I knew I wouldn’t have to dismantle them or manoeuvre them down tiny stairwells, knew that they wouldn’t be damaged by housemates with habits and peculiarities of cleaning different from my own.
I do want to be clear, though – I don’t necessarily want to own my own home, and I don’t think it’s a sustainable way for cities like Sydney to grow and stay vibrant, diverse, or beautiful. I think our ingrained cultural desire for home ownership is very much a geographical and political aberration: so many other cities in the world are inhabited in the majority by long-term renters, unburdened by long-term mortgages – in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, up to sixty per cent of the population rent their homes for their whole lives. What I do want is the kinds of securities and allowances that are in place in countries like these – where lease terms are indefinite, or measured in years, rather than months, where rental rates are legislated or controlled, where tenants cannot be made to leave without consenting and are allowed to paint or even renovate, or simply organise their own repairs (eighty per cent of all repair requests in rental properties are not carried out, either in their entirety or at all), and where they don’t have to ask permission to put a single nail into a wall (because we all know those temporary hooks don’t fucking work). I want to be able to get attached to a place, without knowing that my presence there is always subject to someone else’s needs or whims.
I loved that third house immediately, because it was spacious and bright, because a bamboo beaded curtain served as the pantry door, because there was a half-sized bath that was the perfect size for me, because the landlord lent us his own overlong rug to run down the front hallway and dampen the sound of our footsteps past the bedrooms, which sat in a row down the front part of the house. One housemate was given her brother’s old dining table and painted its top in chalkboard paint; whenever I had friends over for dinner I’d draw placemats and centrepieces on its surface and leave the sticks of chalk beside the cutlery (I secretly hoped my writer friends would scrawl down notes or ideas, but mostly they just drew pictures of oversized boobs). We’d also chalk each other notes here: GOOD LUCK IN YOUR INTERVIEW, or NB: NEED MORE T.P. I bought two tall Billy bookcases to accommodate my books, then two more – made of solid pine and from an actual furniture store – once their chipboard shelves collapsed under the weight of the very things th
ey were designed to hold. There was a housing commission tower behind the back fence (which has been knocked down now) and we would hear our neighbours there singing out conversations across their balconies; an RSL with a thriving vegetable garden to the side, from which old men would sometimes pass me bunches of basil, heads of spinach, whole shopping bags full of chillies. The neighbour directly across the street tutored opera singers from his house on weekday afternoons, and I’d hear snatches of quivering Italian and German as I wrote in the front room. When we received notice to leave this house, in late January, I was in a hospital day program, and though I tried to explain to the therapists there that I had to walk so much on Saturdays to visit houses open for inspection, they didn’t seem to understand the urgency, and prescribed another supplement.
The timing was terrible – not only because of my hospitalisation, but because it meant that we were looking for a new place at the worst possible time of year, when the open houses were crammed full of students about to start at the university just up the road, alongside people shaking up their lives for the new year (new year, new house!), as well as people like my housemates and me, whose current tenancies were coming to an end. My housemates and I looked at properties for ten weeks straight, handing in our applications as we left, stopping for coffee and newspaper quizzes if we had half-hour breaks between inspections. We were five times told by agents that we’d come second in our applications; once told that someone else had offered to pay fifty dollars more rent each week and if we could match that, we could have the place (this is illegal); once told that another group of applicants had put down six months’ rent in advance – and if we could match that, we could have the place. In the very last week before our lease ended and we’d have to move out with no place yet to move in to, we were finally accepted as tenants in a terrace painted brick-red on the outside and with gilded cornices on the inside, right next to a railway bridge that freight trucks thundered over at all hours. There were rats living under the floorboards that we heard scrapping and scraping at night – rats that, after the agent organised a pest controller to visit, would climb out into the backyard to die (it was my job, as the least squeamish housemate, to ferry their fat corpses to the wheelie bins in the front yard). There was a deep and luxurious claw-foot bathtub, a huge backyard where I built a veggie garden using old palings, a cheap hacksaw, and a borrowed drill. It was this house that we had to leave barely six months into our tenancy – even though we’d signed a twelve-month lease – because the owner couldn’t meet her mortgage repayments, despite our generous contributions to them. (In Germany, when rented properties are sold, they are sold with the tenants in place.) It was from this house that I moved to Pine Street, to that house that I so loved and recently had to leave.
And so once again I found myself making a home, moving my furniture around in different spaces to see where it fit best – or least worst, as seemed to be the case in my new bedroom, which has very little wall space between its built-in shelves and two doors, and strange, almost-square proportions, figuring out which fittings fit, walking new streets to find the new shape of my days. I’m at the opposite end of my suburb now, close to the highway, the old smokestacks of Sydney Park, the Fijian grocer with its narrow aisles of spices and packets of sweets, an antique store run by a smiling Nepalese man in a trilby who very quickly came to wave at me each time I passed. When we were looking for a new home, we looked at houses further afield – in Petersham, Stanmore, Alexandria, Marrickville – and I didn’t realise until we did this how deeply I’ve become attached to Newtown, how there’s a part of my self that’s bound up in living here, that has history here, and is closer to comfortable than I’ve ever been; how I sometimes (sometimes) feel that I belong here, and these feelings, comfort, belonging, are things I’ve fought for all my adult life. It’s a false argument to make, I think, that people who struggle to afford their housing or don’t want to deal with the insecurities and unsettlements of renting should just move to some place less desirable, less in demand, to solve the problem. I think of my brother, a policeman, who recently moved to a small town about three-and-a-half hours’ drive from Sydney for work, of how the house he has rented there has a swimming pool, five bedrooms, a double garage, a huge garden, a laundry that is bigger than my bedroom in my Newtown house, and costs almost $100 per week less; but I know it costs him and his wife, and dearly, to be so far away from the support of family, from friends, from the kinds of things – like concerts, beach trips, dinners with friends – that they most enjoy.
In the first weeks in my new house I bought storage boxes for the in-built, open-faced wardrobe, new plugs to hold its shelves in place. I bought new curtains, because the dark pink drapes already hanging there felt fusty and overbearing. At first, I arranged the objects on the mantelpiece above the broken fireplace in the same way that I’d displayed them in the bedroom I’d just left: two decorative boxes that hold my chunky jewellery, the row of books I’m either reading or hoping to read next, a gloriously kitschy lamp shaped like a cockatoo that I picked up at a festival one year, a Chinese clock, a vase – the arrangement that I know by rote because it’s so familiar. But they looked awful in the space, crowded and too colourful next to all my clothes; I tried three different arrangements of the pictures on my walls, and suspect I’ll try others soon. I didn’t feel settled in the space until I’d settled my things into their place, it took me months to orient myself inside it; the shared spaces in the house, for the best part of a year, were spaces in progress. For months, when I came home from the social events that still sometimes leave me exhausted and anxious and overwhelmed, I didn’t yet feel the same relief of being back in my own space, situated, centred, placed. The unsettlement, the disruption of moving, lasts far longer than the weeks spent looking, inspecting and applying, the weeks spent boxing up and packing, relocating, repairing and cleaning. I never know how long it will take for me to once again feel at home.
And yet I know I’m not unlucky: the expenses of moving and re-making, even of paying a new bond before an old bond was returned (it took more than two months for us to see that money) were expenses that I was well-off enough to be able to meet; the difficulties I’ve had in securing a property are nothing like those faced by people who don’t look like me – white-skinned, white-collar, and employed, or employed enough at least. I don’t have children, or a baby, and can’t even imagine how much more difficult packing up a house must be for people who do. And the constraints I face while renting, the insecurities, lack of protection, strictures – these hardships are nothing short of soft when compared to the pressures faced by people living in social housing, like those neighbours in the tower block behind my old house, who have been moved, en masse, to a less valuable piece of real estate; I’ve no idea how long any of them may have lived there, how many similar displacements are planned for similar communities, like those in Milsons Point and Redfern. The social housing sector is one that’s slowly been eroded, stripped back by successive governments, piece by piece. It now makes up less than four per cent of the rental market, even though it caters to the most vulnerable people in our society: the poor, the ill, the disabled, new migrants, Indigenous communities, refugees – the kinds of people who are likely to face discrimination in the wider, unregulated market. And while it’s well known that many homeowners consider renters to be ‘transient, untrustworthy and aesthetically undesirable’ (it’s hard to be aesthetically pleasing when you’re not allowed in any way to change your house), it’s a different class of disdain altogether that’s reserved for housos and commish kids, wherever they may live.
In the days before we moved, we sat in that lovely house on Pine Street, a row of stacked boxes lining the hallway and the loungeroom walls, the curtains pulled from the windows to be laundered, my empty bookshelves looming. One of my housemates, who is a psychology postgrad, joked that we were probably all feeling so unsettled, so vaguely and inchoately not right because our hierarchy of needs had been upset.
It took me a few minutes to remember what she was referring to – a mid-century psychological theory about the kinds of conditions that human beings need in order to thrive. This hierarchy – Maslow’s hierarchy – is usually represented as a pyramid, because all of the higher functions and conditions are dependent on the more basic things that sit beneath them: self-esteem is essential for self-realisation, for example, or without safety it’s impossible to love. At the very bottom of the pyramid are what Maslow termed ‘physiological needs’ – the basic necessities of survival. These are water, and food (Chris Kraus writes that ‘daily life turns into terror as soon as you start doubting food’ and ‘to question food is to question everything’) but also, importantly, shelter. On the rung above these basics are safety and security, physical and economic alike. Without these things, Maslow suggests, we can only live in ‘deficiency’, we cannot make meaning for our own lives, or contribute properly to each others’, to society. And it’s only this that I want: shelter, and security, a stable base from which to build my self and life without constant inconstancy, without the everyday threat that it could all, that day, be once again taken away.