Things We Found in the Move
/Claudia and I have left the desert. We’re in a suburban project home with boxes of treasure in every room.
The full moon over the suburb where we stay was so bright last night you could see blue in the sky. We were woken by a rhythmic noise outside our bedroom window: intrusively loud and close by. Boom-ta-boom-ta-boom. Was it something in the plumbing? Neighbour’s rumpy-pumpy? We couldn’t figure out if it was a machine or an attempted break in. Claudia got up and investigated with the torch. When I admired her bravery, she countered, ’I thought the big boxes in the hallway were people.’ She laughed. ‘Didn’t see anything but the moon.’ Suburban life is full of unfamiliar noises. Even our new fridge speaks a different language.
Coming to Australia’s heavily populated coast has been a big geographical and cultural change. It reminds me of the time I left belly dancing—I taught and performed—when I was studying medicine in my mid-thirties. My teacher, a hearty Aboriginal-Irish woman, said that she understood. ‘It’s like going on a respirator, saying, ‘I don’t really need to breath for awhile.’ You can’t even think about it, but you have to do it,’ she said.
Being out from the desert is like giving up dancing, like leaving behind a kind of breathing. Breathing is literally different here in the close humidity of the coming monsoon. Our faces are plump and smooth with moisture, shiny with sweat.
Along with a change in my work and living place, there’ve been other changes. I had major surgery—it was life-enhancing rather than life-saving—but it’s taken a few months to get my strength back. Claudia has been devoted in her tender, sometimes grumpy, care of me.
We’ve rented a house for the first time in about a decade. It was a challenge. Our rental history is not a conventional one.
I submitted about thirty pages of documentation to a real estate agent’s office to apply for the first house we saw—a few day’s work at the local library. We loved that house. After ten days of phone calls not returned and emails unanswered, we realised that some of the people involved in letting that house might dislike gay people. That happens. Or maybe they realised I’m Aboriginal.
Anyway, we found another house. We liked it, it was cheaper and we were given the keys three days later. It was a satisfying moment when the agents for the first house called the day after we’d moved in to let us know that after their exhaustive investigations... we would be accepted as tenants. Satisfying because we didn’t need it anymore.
In over twelve years of marriage, Claudia and I have lived in many types of accommodation. We’ve lived in a couple of converted shipping containers—which Claudia especially liked because they were up off the ground, meaning less scorpions; miner’s apartments where the downstairs neighbour gave us felt pads for the chair feet because they all worked shifts; a tropical house with terrible damp, rusted louvre windows and bananas and pigs in the garden; another tropical house apparently built over a huge ant colony (we have the same issue in our present tropical house); caravan park cabins and many, many hotel rooms.
Wattle and daub—the worldwide method of building. Pic by MrPanyGoff.
We’ve been in remote Community housing where Claudia had to scrub old blood off the walls and the ceiling fan. We’ve had a couple of Community houses with splendid outlooks you could not pay money for—you have to be invited. One of them was in a creek bed, but it didn’t rain so often in the desert anyway.
We’ve loved many places we lived. Claudia runs a good house and is adept at using a gun of Spakfilla to fill the holes: between tiles, floor and wall, wall and ceiling that are ubiquitous in Australian construction. So many houses here at jerry-built. My maternal grandmother grew up in a wattle and daub hut with quicklime painted on the walls as a gesture towards hygiene. Her parents were English or Irish or both—or Irish pretending to be English. I know there’s a difference. But that lost history is how you end up being called ‘white’ in Australia.
This house is a hollow-walled project home in a suburban street near a coastal city. We’re living near the bottom of a gentle valley. A waterhole with coots and ducks and tall mauve waterlilies is a few houses down. The wetlands is fenced, which the birds probably like. There’s a little park overlooking it, with rubber-seated swings and a plastic bottle made into a bong stashed under the slippery dip. There are still cows and horses on pasture and paperbark, pandanus and ti-tree forests in the middle distance.
Coot mum and bub. Photo by Gnangarra.
The farmland across the way has been razed and divided into blocks. We see houses being built. A new shopping mall is under construction on the other side of the wetlands. Great slabs of precast concrete are lifted into place by cranes every day. We have a great view of progress, which you know is one of my favourite themes.
We saw plenty of progress in the remote Community we’ve just left. In the eight months we were there, we saw and heard continual construction from early each morning, every day of the week. The construction workers came to the clinic sometimes, hurt by the heat and overwork.
We returned to the Community at the beginning of this year after a few years away. There was a lot of change. Houses which had been planned for years had finally been built—big sturdy houses on concrete slabs. That meant that middle-aged people, previously staying in the distant town, and family members who’d never lived in the Community could move back to Country. From the clinic’s viewpoint, these erstwhile urban dwellers brought their middle-aged problems with them. When we were there in 2014, the Community was a deeply peaceful place of the old and the very young.
Now, people in the middle were back. The people of the driven ages, with ambitions, addictions and large doses of hormones in their blood. They needed to find it within themselves to care for the elders, who had become so much older. They also had to consider taking on responsibility for lore and law without the protection of isolation and profound connection the elders had. Some of them had holes in their spirit, inter-generational trauma that their parents were only beginning to acknowledge and understand as they neared the end of life.
When the bigger houses came two years ago, most people had television and internet in their homes for the first time. Some of the young people think the world outside Community is just like television. There’s a lot of FOMO going on.
The internet brought access to shopping direct from China—that great working class supplying the rest of the world with affordable necessities and treats at unbeatable prices. The Chinese workers must understand the richer countries really well. They can see there is a market for the most useless things—pens with acrylic hair on their bobbled heads, a million squeezable toy crocodiles, disposable everything. They can see how big we are as they meet the demand for larger clothing.
Chinese workers are not all stuck indoors. These men were working on the Karakoram Highway in Xinjiang Province. Photo by David Stanley.
China has recently stopped taking recycled garbage from Australia. They now have enough of their own. This island has the challenge of developing its own recycling industry. Locked into their severe contracts and stunted living conditions, their children left behind in the village with ailing grandparents, the Chinese workers must have their own deeper alienation and yearning for better things. Meanwhile, solvent abusers in the remote Australian desert can now order their poisons online.
Here near the coast, the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables is exhilarating to me. Mangoes by the bucket. I’m eating salad everyday—a lettuce that snaps, a cucumber that keeps for more than a day, fruit that keeps for a week, fish out of the sea that morning—these are the substantial compensation for the anonymity and Country-under-concrete tension of a more urban life. Water comes rushing out of the tap in a way that’s probably illegal. We can drink it. It probably hasn’t got uranium in it, like the Community water did (which must be illegal).
Unpacking our own gear, including the bobbled-headed pens and squeezable crocodiles, has been heart-warming and appalling by turns for me and Claudia.
Finding clothes—that purple polo shirt—I haven’t worn purple for so long. All my paints and crayons, that pretty string of beads. It’s like shopping without money where you like everything already.
Feeling happy to be near the ocean. One of my wife’s recent portraits of me. Claudia Jocher 2019.
It’s emotional too. That dark red scarf from Claudia’s mum still smells of her perfume. Claudia’s body of photographic work in lush framed prints and boxes of slides (most of them blue from her years spent underwater), the faded watermelon-patterned socks I bought on the wharf in San Francisco and wore out walking around Uluru. Some things didn’t do so well. The rubber bands I used to pack Claudia’s wooden dhoni—a model of the Maldivian boats made without glue or nails—after I’d oiled it for export home dissolved into globs of coloured plastic on the wood. Most things were okay, though. Unlike our previous move, nothing was stolen. Realising that has restored trust.
When we first moved in we came to appreciate mundane essentials. There was nothing to sit on for a while, which was tiring. We’ve bought a washing machine and a fridge. Our new bed comes this week after a few weeks camping on a blow up bed from Aldi. We don’t have a kettle, a microwave or a television. You can get by without those.
This kind of housing maximises consumption of machines. In caravan parks people get by with communal laundries. In Claudia’s village when she was a child there was centralised distribution of milk—you carried a milk can to the dairy to collect it. There was a community oven for baking on a large scale. Here in Australia the milkman, baker and sometimes the grocer brought goods to our homes in the ‘sixties. People had to visit much more before everyone had a telephone, when I was a child. Houses were used differently.
Outdoors is not always good. Laundry in the ice. Painting by Pekka Halonen.
One of my friends was a rabbitoh when he was a kid. He and his uncle caught rabbits. They hung them on a carrying pole over their shoulders. Calling out as they went, they sold them cheap and freshly-killed to local cooks. There may have been less privacy, but more connection in that way of living. A bit like the Community. People have a different set of social skills. Community people know how to end a conversation, how to get someone out of their house. I’m not sure if people around here even know how to invite someone in to their house, let alone get them out again.
In our new house the unpacking has been steady, solid work. Claudia erected the bookshelves (which are planks that fit together tightly without nails) and affixed them to the wall with not much more than an admiring gaze from the bottom of the ladder from me. Working my way through boxes, I’ve had Beastie Boys songs in my head: Can’t, Won’t, Don’t Stop and, when I was really driving myself mad, walking into a room and not being able to remember why I was there, Sabotage. I’m so grateful we don’t have an upstairs here.
There are a thousand delights in having a house. Putting clothes in a drawer. Not having to carry so much. I can put books and papers away. Our own cutlery and seeing different types of plates and bowls. That’s what they never give you in hotels—a plate, not even a saucer in most places. And never a knife. We have a great collection of knives now from having to buy a sharp one so many times in so many places. You can’t carry them on planes, so they get packed away.
Bush turkey (aka Brush turkey). Noisy, good to eat. Photo by Joseph C Boone.
What we have carried on planes and in cars are the brilliant Aboriginal landscape paintings we’ve bought, bartered and been given over the years. We’ll have to live here about fifteen years to get a chance to live with all of them, if we rotate them yearly over the wall space. That’s what I’ve spent my money on. I’m glad for it. These paintings evoke the vibes of the places we’ve been—strange, powerful, demanding—better than anything else except the people.
Out in the yard this morning I filled in two big holes made by a bush turkey whose powerful claws woke us up last night. He’s plundering mulch for nesting material. We’re still in his forest after all. It’s good to remember where you’ve been. But sometimes it takes a bird to make you pay attention to where you are now.
Thumbnail pic of removalists by Kiwi in a bag (not our piano).
