hen we lived in the country before the pandemic, I drove my children past a building site on the way to school. Green farmland unfurled on one side of the road, but the other side had been subdivided. New houses were going up. My children called one house– less of a compliment and more an attempt to grapple for a word that would convey the monstrous proportions of the building.
Middle-class Australians are obsessed with real estate, perpetually standing around in pubs and at dinner parties discussing the attributes of various homes, worrying about whether they can afford the mortgage. But if every home we live in looks the same, thenmake homes, not the other way around. I have lived in a lot of houses – more than I can catalogue here.
When I was pregnant with our first child, we moved away from the weatherboard house to a small country town. The town we chose, with its botanic gardens and plentiful stores of water in the local reserve, seemed a safe choice for inner-city types who were also worried about impending environmental doom.