Che Guevara, Where Are You Now?
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday May 16, 1988
I ONCE said I could live in a tent and be happy. But now, the prospect of being homeless haunts me.
All my friends are buying houses, doing the rounds of auctions and real estate agents. Their conversations run along narrow-gauge tracks: sanders, roofers, tilers, decorators and dead locks. My eyes glaze over.
Property has always bored me. I have seen home ownership turn men of passion into wimps and bores. No more talk of politics, sex and religion. Now it is all mortgage talk, and interest rate talk, conversion chatter and auction blues.
A house was bought and then it consumed the buyer; its needs were endless, and endlessly discussed. It changed the owner's personality and then their politics. Maggie Thatcher knew what she was doing. She turned a million public housing tenants into home buyers. Maggie Thatcher was creating Tories.
That was why I stayed a renter stubbornly through my 30s. I feared attachment to things, especially nice, expensive things. I feared their power to corrupt. I felt no obligation to fill my rented flats with items of quality and durability. These might wheedle a way into my heart, leave a gap when stolen. They would require double-locks and window locks and bars. Home ownership led, I thought, to the elevation of things over people. It led to the private life, the home life.
I used my savings to see New York, London and Paris, and I learnt that home ownership was utterly, deeply Australian. The rest of the world was not so fixated on the private block. Renting for life was normal elsewhere. The excitement of these cities, their street life and cafe life, became associated with renting. A city of renters seemed a much more interesting place to be.
But in Australia, this was heresy. The backyard, the backyard barbecue, the backyard swimming pool were emblems of the Lucky Country.
For a brief decade, say 1968-78, all the conventions were questioned. The nuclear family and the private bungalow which housed them were examined and found defective: too lonely, too boring, too tense.
Like many of the Vietnam generation I lived communally. The platonic households puzzled my family. They urged me in the early days to put a lock on my bedroom door. But communal living was fun. It was tied up with all the ferment of that era: the sexual and women's revolutions, getting high, dropping out, the Whitlam optimism, the search for an Australian identity.
But I got stuck there and nearly everyone else moved on. They outgrew the raucous households, the rickety couches, the Che Guevara posters, the squabbles over housework.
When everyone started buying houses, a great pall dropped over Australia. People turned inwards. Caring went out, conservatism set in.
The younger generation spurned the example of their older siblings. The Age of Unemployment tied them to Mum and Dad through university and beyond. Raucous households were bad for study. Rebellion did not fit into plans for advancement through the company.
I met up with an old friend from communal-living days. Like me, he had creases around his eyes. A lonely rump we were. He had dropped out of university to become a clown. Now he was a clerk in the Public Service. He had a child and a wife and he was dirt-poor. He would never, he said, be able to buy a house.
He was cut out for life.
Suddenly I felt fear clutch at my heart. For the first time, I spied a vision of myself: old, poor, single and alone in a rented room. A rented room. Why did such horror attach itself to those words?
Because, I saw in a flash, renters were trash in Australia. We were left to the wolves of the market. There is no rent control as in New York and London. There is a scandalous shortage of public housing. When property developers get tax breaks, they build luxury apartments. There are no tax breaks for renters. Millionaires play the property market. The Government encourages them with negative gearing.
I did not want to end up among the poorest of the poor, a pensioner on the private rental market, one rung up from the homeless.
Everything conspires in Australia to make home-owners of us all. Or rather, everything conspires to bolster, flatter and pamper the people with deposits.
I fell into the bank manager's arms, not because I wanted to, but because I felt afraid.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald
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