a life nomadic

And we will find another

home, reconstruct the

furniture of our lives,

unfurling once more

the portable hearth of

a life nomadic.

A few years ago, I moved house for the thirteenth time. I was twenty-three years old. Physically, what I left behind that day were the bones of a stripped down, empty bedroom. By this point: just four pale blue walls, dancing balls of dust and debris that had collected in buried corners, a bare space of polished floorboards, and a blankly gazing window unveiled of its curtains.

My home was no longer contained within that room. It was bound now in transit, bundled away in the old cardboard packing boxes that passed from doorway to truck. Boxes with labels that someone had scribbled on a few too many times. Boxes that were covered in large blue marker capitals - with the words BEDROOM STUFF written on the side. And then there was one box (the very oldest of them all) that still wore its original title: KIDS TOYS, written without the apostrophe after kid. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, how amazing that box has survived so long! It must have been over fifteen years old. And so I carried it ever so carefully, passing it up to my mother, who - taking charge of the removal truck, as she was wont to do - wedged it between a bed head and a dressing table. To this day, I still wonder if mum had somehow known to keep those boxes in reserve, anticipating the next time.

From childhood to the point of ‘leaving home’, I moved house on average once every 1.8 years with my mum and younger brother. In the time that has since comprised my adult life, five years is still the longest time I can count having lived in any one home. Five years, in that thirteenth house by the sea, with the pale blue bedroom and polished floorboards.

My experience of suburban nomadism began, quite frankly, with my father’s issues with alcohol, the ensuing divorce, and the selling up of the family home in regional Tasmania. I was six and a half years old. My brother was three. After a temporary stay with relatives, we settled quickly into a pattern of shifting from one rented dwelling to another, driven into movement through a combination of circumstances and the pursuit of a better life. Together, these calls to movement took us across the borders of three states. It took us also into the backyard caravans or spare bedrooms of family friends, while transitioning into other places. As well, such movement ushered my passage through the gates of four primary and three public high schools.

In the five years since leaving that thirteenth abode, the movements have continued. My  brother has shifted through three share houses, and a flat by himself. Most recently, we have both been sharing a rented house in the heart of the city, where I have since completed my PhD and my brother has commenced undergraduate studies in architecture.

Our mum, meanwhile, has been living a happily retired ‘grey nomad’ life with her lifelong friend and lover (and as of this year, partner of six years). Together, they have been cruising slowly up and down Australia in their ten metre long motorhome, aptly named Second Wind. 


My father, on the other hand, sadly died this year at the age of sixty, having faced life-long struggles with alcoholism and depression. Although he passed on without having seen his children grow up, he did leave to us the only vessel he had ever felt at ease within: A vintage 1960s wooden yacht named Marionette, which had been home to him and his seafaring cat for the last few years of his life. Not being imbued with the same love of boats and the seafaring life, my brother and myself recently sold Marionette to the restorative care of a man who shared the same pontoon with my father, and who had had the opportunity to make his acquaintance in the last months of my father’s life, having learned the tricks of navigation from him.

As for the thirteenth house itself, this dwelling was sold off by the landlord a few years back, purchased by our affable neighbour (one of the few neighbours we ever had a chance to establish a memorable rapport with), subsequently demolished and has since given way to the construction of a set of single storey units that have themselves been rented out.

Like an existential passenger, this state of tenuous dwelling seems to have followed me into the patterning of my own adult life. In the years since, I have shifted an additional three houses – somehow uncannily maintaining my housing average of one shift every 1.8 years. Not one of these moves have particularly been of my preference. All of them, in one way or another, have been driven through external pressures and circumstances. At the same time however, this almost unbidden state of movement seems to have become a structuring aspect of my very being. In many respects, it is a part of my history and – I’m beginning to think, family heritage – that I would be loath to change. 

The question of home and its intimate relationship with identity is never far from my mind, in large part because of my long acquaintance with tenuous living. It is precisely why I am fascinated with the intimacies and possibilities of inhabitation. The housing moves that became the norm of my existence are also why I structure my memories by address. It is why, now at the age of twenty eight, I am able to arrange my recollections by the ‘era’ of this or that house on this or that street as though I am speaking of evolutionary epochs. It is why I can say “that was back in Catherine Street days” or “those were the Grange years” and, in doing so, trace the exact circumference of what was going on at that time in our lives - by reference to where we lived. This is why, as a child, I filled sketchbooks with floor plans and maps for new urban developments, creating my own worlds of inhabitation with pencil and paper. It is also why, when other children wanted to be doctors or fire-fighters, I wanted to be a real estate agent, and why – when at one place we had a tree house ­- I labelled the main branches with apartment numbers and had open inspections for imaginary tenants.

My experiences of tenuous housing are also why, in my adulthood, I have now become the keeper of other people’s stories about the struggle for home, and the sacredness of dwelling. First, this has happened through my doctoral research into youth homelessness. Most recently it has found its expression in landing a job that, quite unintentionally, has since meant working with a team of university-based housing researchers. Through this work, it has become ‘my thing’ to unravel, in simple conversation with others, the most fundamental meanings of home – namely, through in-depth interviews with people whose housing has been affected by disability, by mental illness or by homelessness. At the same time, I suspect that our childhood experiences of residential mobility also have some guiding role in my brother’s present path towards becoming an architect.

At a more foundational level, I owe much of my fascination with the intimacies of dwelling spaces to the efforts and labours of my mother, Jeannette, as we were growing up. For much of our childhood and adolescence, putting the proverbial food on the table was an all-consuming task – although for our sake, I know now that my mum worked hard to conceal from her children the enormous stresses she laboured under.

Until I started high school, our financial mainstay was the variety of cleaning jobs that she was able to take on. In the school holidays or when my brother and I were off from school sick, we'd sometimes come along to the places where she cleaned. For all that it might be considered a ‘low status’ job, I still look back fondly on mum’s handful of  cleaning gigs, and the ways in which they are still somehow interwoven with a sense of wonder and play; a special sense of  fascination and imaginative introspection that happily shaped the bulk of my childhood.

To the occupants of the places where my mother cleaned, she was a kind of invisible hand. She was someone who came through when they weren’t there, made everything sparkle, and left no other trace of herself in the act. But to me, it was the occupants of the houses who were the mysterious and elusive presences, and not of course my mother. I never once knew or met these people, but the houses themselves were the outward embodiment of their lives. For a child, that was a wonderful, compelling kind of mystery. I can still recall my wonder at trying to imagine the shape and form of those absent lives, whose traces I saw in the dwellings around me. I wondered what they looked like and what kind of people they were; what lives they led and what made them happy.

Every house had its special attraction. In one place, down near the railway line, it was the sprawling great old walnut tree, casting its seemingly endless bounty across the soft, green winter grass beyond the peeling French doors. Sometimes, the owners of that house would leave out some of those walnuts for us in a bowl on the kitchen table, and I would spend my time there cracking open the shells and looking for the sweetest pick. That being said, they were a messy household. The fridge always seemed to be filled with mould; there were clothes and toys all over every floor surface, and the bathtub was forever full of dirty water and soap scum from the children’s baths. I remember mum always came home from this job with a complaint (or five) about how much they ‘let the house go’ between her cleaning visits.

In another house, it was the lurid canary yellow kitchen and the 1960s décor that held my fascination. There were no children living in this place. It was a young couple, I believe, in a house down by the beach, off a tiny lane that led down to the Esplanade near the foreshore. It had a jelly bean shaped pool out in the backyard, and the house for some reason smelt of stale bread when it sits for a while in an enclosed space. The occupants had a grey cat that snuggled up against me when I sat in the sunshine by the pool. I’d speak to it, or read to it whatever book I had brought along with me. Whenever I accompanied my brother to this place during the school holidays, he and I would pretend that our car was a submarine, and the roads leading to Semaphore and down the tiny lane were deep underwater channels. The houses we stopped off at, they were docking stations. The backyard pool was there to house and train dolphins. The possibilities were, of course, endless.

At another place mum cleaned, it was the back garden that I was fascinated with. I remember concrete stepping stones leading to an old moss-footed fountain, filled with the sequined glittering of dozens of goldfish. There was a rusty park bench too, beneath a gently swaying weeping willow, and countless mottled cats basking in the afternoon sun, or hiding underneath the house. The people who lived there were involved in a small theatre company. It was the most relaxed, airy and flowing house I had known. All rambling and bohemian, filled with curio and art. Whenever I was there, I would spend my time reclining in the sunroom, or standing and tracing with my eyes the stitches of the bright fabric wall hangings and quilt work.

Wherever mum’s jobs took us on occasions, I’d find such treasures and gravitate towards them, no matter how banal or insignificant they may have seemed to an adult. I’d take in the strange smells and wonder at the personal meaning of the countless ornaments and knickknacks that occupied shelves and ledges, all the while taking these impressions and adding them to the pictures I had in my mind of how these people looked and lived. I created whole worlds for them in my imagination, out of little more than getting a sense of the fragments and trappings of their hearths.

In another respect, my fascination with dwelling and with home(s) comes from my mother’s exquisite attention to our own dwelling places. Growing up, I came to appreciate and admire the myriad ways she cared for every one of our rented houses, with a knack for making whatever place we lived in truly feel ‘at home’. Wherever we went, her ‘colonising’ labours were performed with a great deal of pride and creativity. Mum still tells me that “in another life, I might have been a landscaper or an interior designer”. And for a long time, one of mum’s greatest efforts in this respect was her compulsive need to rearrange the lounge room furniture every couple of months, and to redecorate rooms (a compulsion which I inevitably adopted myself).  Another important aspect of her restless and determined ‘homing’ instinct was her need to make gardens wherever we went. 

Mum is the second of four sisters who grew up in regional Queensland, in a weatherboard house without interior plastered walls. It was a rambling property, headed up by the free-spirited but intemperate matriarchal force of nature that was my nanna, Yvonne, and the numerous male consorts who – at different periods – resided there as fathers (biological or adoptive), drinking partners or in some cases, marriage partners of convenience (with some more stable and stalwart an influence in mum and her sisters’ lives than others). The place, from conversations with my mum over the years, was a large property; with free-roaming chickens, wild tree frogs living in the rafters, a rambunctious fox terrier; an overcrowded bedroom shared between all the siblings, and a great Australian outhouse that was sanitised with lime powder. And truly, my mother’s regional Queensland upbringing had made her inseparable from the earth; from gardens and plants and landscape. I still think of her in some ways as the earth’s embodiment; the soil passing through her fingers like the sands of eternity, giving life to the growing plants that always seem (to me at least) to hold a part of her soul.

Not long after we moved into any given house, mum would set to work etching out and maintaining an entire landscape around us. It never mattered that the soil wasn’t hers; just like the myriad houses we passed through.  It was enough for her that she could make a garden grow wherever we went. In fact, with just a trailer full of mulch, a considered trip to the local nursery, and a couple of days of toiling to and fro with a wheelbarrow, mum – sunburned, sweaty and strong – would relentlessly and ritually transform a rabble of neglected weeds or a stretch of dead grass and dirt into abundant gardens. Traces of these landscapes and their former beauty remain today in some of our old houses around the country. These, I have always felt, were my mother’s indelible and devoted marks upon a shifting stage.

So it was as we went along. For my brother and myself, every move began the zealous task of remaking our respective territories and habits. Of choosing and maintaining spaces, arranging and inhabiting bedrooms, working out a new and unfamiliar neighbourhood; and becoming the much dreaded new kid at school. All of this had to be done, of course, without dwelling too much on the thought that maybe, just a year or two from now, we would have to do the same thing all over again in some other place. Because, of course, there never was any way of knowing if or when the next shift might happen, or for what reason (for all our little family knew and hoped, our current place was going to last).

But still, through it all, I don’t think I ever felt like I wasn’t at home, somewhere and somehow.

For us, this was because home didn’t hinge on our address. Home was our little family. And because of that, that sense of meaningful dwelling was something that travelled within us. Really, it was through my mother’s strength that we could unfurl our portable hearth wherever we went, and still stand steadfast against the attrition of a life nomadic. And so it was that each house, piece by piece, became another sewn in part of an itinerant patchwork quilt; the traces of our lives time and again dissembled…

reassembled...clung to,

thrown out and lost in transit.

But as long as we travelled together, we were never far from home.