For Sale - by Ruth Quibell
ISLAND | ISSUE 147Ruth Quibell on homesickness and the fading of the great Australian dream
On my desk sits a small oil painting. Executed in a few Heidelberg-style brushstrokes, the 4 x 5.5 inch canvas is of a white house in the country. What was once a grass foreground is dusty, sun-bleached and desiccated by an ordinary Australian summer. Remnants of a barbed wire fence run along to the house while pine trees, alien green, stand upright behind it. The house itself is an impression, as if glanced from a car window: a rusty corrugated roof, brown splodges as windows, white walls.
This painting is inseparable from the poem-like pencil scrawl on the back:
‘This is for sale,
2 acres a lot of weads
And a lot of HOT
Beautiful Days’
Written by the artist, a fellow postman, the inscription was a knowing jest. It was a gift to my father on the eve of his return to England, and my mother tells me this message spoke directly to the tear in his reality. He knew, in a kind of choose-your-own-adventure way, that Australia had more potential for him, including the possibility of a home beyond a council flat. These days he’d be called an economic migrant. But the homesick part of him craved the familiar ritual of summer evenings in country pubs, hedge-lined lanes, the reassurance of old friends.
This longing for home is common even among those who choose to leave. Homesickness, as University of Lincoln researcher Dieu Hack-Polay summarises, is variously experienced as inner conflict, reduced personal control, personal loss and grief, as well as the sustained disruption and difficulty in re-establishing everyday routines. While these psychological and practical struggles can be explained as stages to eventual adjustment, they also involve suffering. I am not an expat, but I recognise something akin to homesickness every time a ‘For Sale’ sign is affixed to the front of my rented homes.
“I am not an expat, but I recognise something akin to homesickness every time a ‘For Sale’ sign is affixed to the front of my rented homes.”
Like most Australians, I once aspired to own a home of my own, but as I get older, and property prices further part ways with median incomes, I know it is unlikely. I’m far from an outlier. According to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, ownership rates are falling among those aged under 55 years, with the greatest declines concentrated among those aged 25–34 and 35–44. Surprisingly, the personal toll on those excluded from ownership hasn’t garnered as much attention. Perhaps there is shame in admitting this failure, or we stoically dull ourselves from feeling this pain. What happens when roots to home and place are at the whims of the market?
“What happens when roots to home and place are at the whims of the market?”
While adulthood is often a time when we confront the limits of our personal control, an inhospitable housing environment starkly exposes these limits. In Britain, sociologists John Bone and Karen O’Reilly have observed the consequences of the housing shift for an emerging generation of adults. This is a group that now ‘consider that their prospects of accessing a normal life trajectory ... have been irretrievably damaged, leading to a burgeoning undercurrent of despondency, frustration and anger’. This is borne as personal failure, inner conflict and loss of control.
In a ballooning property market, in the absence of supportive legislation, a rented house can be shelter but not necessarily a home. From regular rental inspections to displacement through lease terminations, an enduring home cannot be taken for granted.
“In a ballooning property market, in the absence of supportive legislation, a rented house can be shelter but not necessarily a home. From regular rental inspections to displacement through lease terminations, an enduring home cannot be taken for granted.”
Let me be clear, this isn’t the hardships of extreme poverty or the existential uncertainty of serious illness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult. It is hard to live in a perpetual state of ‘as if’ settled; to continually confront your own lack of control of circumstances, belonging and unthinking exclusion. It is hard to be forced to relinquish the space you have lived in, or to know the ‘60-day notice’ to vacate can arrive at any time. It is hard to repeatedly pick up and remake home elsewhere.
In my dreams I walk the dusty roads that lead to my teenage rural home. It seems vivid and reassuring at the time, but I wake to the knowledge that there is no such place to which to return. As I look out the window to the ‘sold’ sign, I’m already mentally packing up this house. I try to tell myself a story of being as light and agile as the situation requires. It’s an awful lie. Whatever my other achievements at work, or in my personal relationships, I am left with an unresolved longing for a permanent home. A homesickness not just for the quaint house I left in order to grow up, but a forward-projecting grief for the home I reasonably expected to make. It’s an outdated romantic ideal, but I still keep my dad’s little painting on my desk. Will there be such a place for me? I fear I already know the answer. ▼
This article appeared in Island 147 in 2016. Order a print issue here.
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