Colour and the House

Have you ever painted a room? If so, you may well know the horror of carefully picking from the thousand and one shades of paint, all with absurd names which tell you damn all about the colour, and way too much about the minds of marketing people...
...And then finding that what looked great on the tiny sample swatch turns into a violently throbbing migraine-inducer when its actually on the dining room wall.

I'm told that the trick is to find a colour you really really like, then get the paint guy to mix it up three shades lighter - it may still be a shock, but it'll at least be a pale one.

The current fad for DIY has also spawned a big industry in DIY rescue - with gadgets, software and "colour professionals" making easy money by correcting people's self-improvement mistakes. I've been playing with some of the colour-matching software, like ColourSchemer and Matching Colour, which are designed to take the guesswork out of painting by providing an instant chart of complementary (and clashing) colours. In theory, if you use this software and remember the formula 60/30/10 (for main shade, complementary shade and trim) you'll always end up with a harmonious colour result. Of course, if you started out which a scary main colour in the first place you might still end up sleeping in a bedroom painted like one of the circles of hell - but at least it will be a well-balanced circle, shadewise.

Coloured paint is actually a fairly new phenomenon - its only been available for around 100 years. Before that, good old honest whitewash was as complicated as wall-colouring ever got. But industrialisation brought us latex paints, wallpaper, tin mouldings for ceilings and fake wood-panelling, all in around 20 jam-packed years, and the home-handy person was born.

I'm personally pretty cautious about coloured paint. I like my walls a decent, muted white or cream; but I admit that some of my friends have done some pretty spectacular things with plum-coloured feature-walls, and entry halls the colour of fresh blood. I love the feeling of intoxication I get from a spectacularly coloured room. I'm just not sure I'd want to feel that way every time I sat down to write a letter, or drink coffee, or did a load of ironing. The human body is a weird and amazing thing, and it can surprise you with the things it decides it will not tolerate after a late-night Prawn Biriani, or a long day at the office.

My bedroom has pale blue wallpaper, dotted with small, faint, pink rosebuds - sounds ghastly I admit - but it is, at least, not actively aggressive. I'm very sensitive to light - in our house we call the sensation, "Light Poisoning",(and all migraine-sufferers will know what I mean), and I'm careful to pull down the blinds and drop the heavy curtains at night, so that dawn does not hit me between the eyes like a hammer. So I need walls that I can rely on - nice, steady, calm, quiet walls which stay where they belong and don't try to get my attention by making my brains dribble out my ears. So, no symphonies of citrus, grapefruit and ice tea shaded paint for me.

Most of our other walls are (genuine) wood panel - nice, stately, under-stated - kind of like an old dog or a discreet butler...quiet, reliable and comforting, and not too demanding. My youngest daughter, on the other hand, currently has a new paint scheme in mind for her room - as far as I can divine it will be predominantly port-wine red, with ochre and sand coloured trim. I'm sure it will look magnificent, just so long as I never have to go in there.

Dining Room

When I was a small child my world revolved around my parent's dining room table. With six brothers and sisters, along with their spouses, love-interests and the swarms of stray children my mother fostered, our dining room was like a small village. Someone or ones were always there doing homework or taxes or writing speeches or playing table billiards or, or, or....

At mealtimes the table fitted 12 people comfortably and sixteen without too much squash, and with a 'children's table' for special events like Christmas the room might buldge with 2 dozen people eating, arguing, playing cards, sleeping, throwing things at each other, feeding the baby and anything else that struck them as a good idea at the time.

But the really impotant thing about the table was the privilege of sitting there after a meal and taking part in the never-ending debate about politics, human rights, left-wing and right-wing politics, grass-roots activism, and the viciously accurate gossip savoured by a table full of journalists, politicians and trades unionists.

Let me tell you, holding onto your right to a sit at that table was a big deal - you had to listen carefully, weigh every thought (every breath), consider your position from six or seven angles and then wait for an opportunity to voice your position...and a misjudged word or a too-shallow understanding of the issues would see you ridden over by the posse and left sitting in the dust, until you were choofed off to help with the dishes or watch TV with the kids.

One of the first lessons I learned was that waiting for a gap in the conversation meant you might mean you never, ever got the chance to speak - so I began to speak up, then over the hubbub, and demand that people hear me (and hopefully listen to me). I learned how to compete in the rough and tumble of political debate; how to argue for a position I hadn't even realised I held until I was challenged to think twice, on the run, with several adults looking at me smugly.

It was the place where I learned to listen too, and to think more deeply, and to care about people, animals, places and things which didn't normally concern a 10 year old girl. It was the place where I learned to tell a convenient lie from the hardest truths, and propaganda from reasoned argument. It was where I learned to be outraged at events I would never be part of, and sympathy for people I'd never meet.

While other kids were in the other room watching cartoons I was discussing the Vietnam war and the Pentagon papers. It was the place where I learned how to "follow the money" and feel a sense of grim satisfaction at Richard Nixon's resignation. And it was the place where I would hear the gossip and whispered innuendo which turned out, in later years, to be the "shocking revelation" of one political scandal after another.

It was a tough and often vicious school - that table, and not one a little girl ought to have been playing at. But today I miss it the way other people miss Christmas lunches or grandma's kitchen. I became the fully-fledged product of that environment - a writer of intelligence, substance and considerable skepticism and wit...and I still feel like i'm 10 years old.
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secrethouses@optusnet.com...au

Home as Bomb Shelter

A few years ago, for reasons we don't need to go into here, I sank into a deep depression and couldn't work for almost two years. My world shrank down to one room - my bedroom - and didn't even expand to encompass the whole house for over 12 months.

It's strange how it happened; the stages of sinking and rising, I mean. One Saturday morning, crying for the 50th time that week, I said to my husband, "You know, I think I might be a bit depressed."
He looked at me with one of those 'well duh' faces and said, "D'ya think?"

On Monday I went to the doctor and then my world just sort of fell apart like one of those demolitions you see on the TV news...the ediface of my public life just exploded silently, like the sound had been turned down, and everything crumbled with a soft sigh into the dusty ruins.

Actually silence is a pretty apt description of phase one of the depression. I found that my "rich inner life" - my noisy, busy, creative mind had gone entirely blank and silent. I recall sitting in a chair in the living room for two or three weeks with absolutely no internal voice. Complete silence. That and a deep, physical sensation of misery. It was amazing and I tried to explain it to my husband and my doctor, but I don't think I was ever able to convey the sensation of total inner silence and loss.

A few weeks later the silence ended and an extremely noisy spell took over - completely opposite and terrible. Now I had voices in my head all the time - voices yelling at me, screaming at me, voices telling me what a bad, hopeless, helpless worthless wretch I was.
And just to make it interesting I began to see things too - grotesque people who stood at the foot of my bed, screaming. It got so bad that one particular woman, with long grey dishevelled hair, took to throwing footballs at me, which hit me as hard and as solidly as a real football, leaving me feeling black and blue. Fortunately for me, in a fit of self-preserving madness, my favourite old wheat-pillow transmogrified into a fierce little terrier which always managed to frighten the crazy woman away.

Many drugs, much time, a suicide attempt and a self-mutilating haircut later I moved into a less frightening time - if you call jumping three feet at every phone call, every bump, every door knock and every 'thump' of a little bird landing on the couch to be fed, less frightening. My world was my bedroom.
I moved a TV in there - something I regard as a sin against sleep now - and stayed awake all night, frightened of the sounds outside, the sounds inside, and the sounds in my own head - only being able to fall asleep when dawn's first grey light allowed me to see that everything was safe.

My eventual recovery was delayed by several months after 9/11. Foolish as it sounds now, my dreams in August and early September were filled with catastrophes especially dreams of planes crashing into my office, up on the 13th floor of a city building. The dream came unbidden night after night after night, along with two others; the bomb in the foyer, and the masked gunman running loose on the floor, killing people randomly in office after office.

So when, as usual, I lay awake in the small hours watching a cable feed of the NBC Today Show, I saw the planes hit the towers, and I don't think I left the TV set again for around three weeks - long after my family couldn't bear to look at the pictures one more time. I'm not sure what I was doing - feeling responsible? Wondering if I was clairvoyant? Wondering if I told someone about the dreams then, well, maybe there wouldn't have been a 9/11?

I can't remember now; but I bought every book, read every line of every newspaper and magazine story, bought the documentary made by those two French brothers; couldn't let it go. It took a long time to get over but I still can't work out what I was doing around all that. The only positive which came from it was that my search for anything related to the day began to lead me out of the house and into the world. I began to ring friends and family to make sure they were safe and OK and even talk to strangers who needed, like me, to talk and talk about that day.

Now I'm back at work - after several months of small steps and mis-starts, and I now longer leap in the air when the phone rings. But there's one thing which lingers with me, and still makes my nights a misery....dreams about "safe" houses.

I devised my own sort of therapy towards the ned which worked - a bit. Every night I'd go to bed and try to imagine my small, safe place - a refuge and a retreat - the prefect house where no one could get to me, where sleep was restful and the world was 100 miles away. And every night these thoughts sent me to sleep and helped me heal - except.....I was never able to build the "safe" house. Every design, every location, every fantastic means of making it safe and secure was never enough, and I'd find myself getting into a dream-frenzy, trying, trying, trying to create the safe space.

These dreams are still with me, and they still wake me up with a jolt so that I have to get up, check all the doors and windows and reassure myself that my own, real home is still my well-protected castle. These days, to test myself, I deliberately leave windows open and doors unlocked to prove to myself that nothing bad is going to happen and no bogeyman is going to leap out and grab me. To prove that I am safe, and this house is safe, and my life is safe enough to keep living it. But I still dream about my small, safe house - and I don't think I'll ever really find it again.

secrethouses@optusnet.com.au

"Home is the place where, if you have to go there they have to take you in"

I had a happy birthday phone call from our oldest daughter today, who's spent the last year in the tiny Scottish village of Ullapool, so far north that its practically in the arctic circle. She's been working in a tourist hotel, playing music in a local folk band and seeing snow for the first time (definitely not an easy thing to come across in Australia.)

But what she's mostly been doing is finishing her growing up - something she couldn't manage here; too close to too many people who kept rescuing her from this or that silly thing. The poor kid struggled and struggled to discover what made her different and special and a complete person in her own right, and her struggles began to become life-threatening when she felt that she was somehow coming up short. So, in order to 'find herself' she bought a backpack and a plane ticket and disappeared over the horizon to see whether she might be hiding there.

Happily, it appears that she was, because her emails and phonecalls are now full of happy, excited tales of big adventures and simple pleasures and amazed revelations about the feeling that she's "come home" in the high Scottish wastes - as if she's always belonged there.

Its a funny thing, this feeling of 'home'. As far as we know, no one we're related to or descended from comes from Scotland, but she felt an immediate, heartfelt connection and heart's ease - she knew she was safe and sound and where she belonged, and she's been able to do the things and be the person she couldn't connect to before.

She feels closer to the family too, and when she rings its often to be told and retold stories of her childhood - family Christmases; favourite games she and her Dad used to play; silly stories about her baby sister and all the other things which reassure her that she is loved, even though she is 10,000 miles away. She wraps these memories around herself like a portable-hug and is growing in confidence inside this soft cocoon. I can't wait to see what kind of butterfly flies back to us.

The only mishap on this upward road was a recent journey to Bristol; her father's home city. Her Dad's family are tough Bristol-city-poor who literally fought their way to a better life. The family business, a metalsmith's on the High Street, was bombed out in a World War II air raid - you can still see the shopfront in a famous photograph of an earlier bombing which killed dozens and turned over double-decker buses. Eventually the family was bombed out of three houses, and my husband's father - then a little lad of eight or nine - was convinced that Hitler was after him, personally. He had nighmares which made him climb out of his bedroom window - completely asleep - and hide in neighbours houses, where he's be found, naked and cold, asleep on sofas or beside the fireplace.

My darling daughter decided she's go to Bristol to meet whatever relatives still lived there, and find the sites of some of the more colourful and romantic stories she's heard around the family dinner table. That's the other thing about her Dad's family - they're wonderful, lyrical, magical storytellers - all soft Bristolian burr and the rolling rythms of port city folk and merchant seamen. She wanted to see Thomas Street where grandad was born, RedMaids school and Queen Elizabeth's Hospital and "the backs" and Temple Mead...but what she found was a thousand miles from the tales and much closer to the bleak, broken, deprived landscape which is modern Britain.

The poor suburbs of Bristol are now ghettos - full of new arrivals from the outposts of a ruined empire. There are Asian families, African families, West Indian families - all struggling, all disenfranchised from this new land, and severed from the old, all trying to beg, borrow or steal acceptance and a better life for their children. There are a dozen different religions and a score of different gangs, and it was an awful shock for an Australian girl who had never really known struggle or strife or segregation until she dropped into the middle of this alien landscape which she's imagined as belonging to her.

She left Bristol in less than a week - cutting short a planned three month stop - and retreated to Ullapool in a deep depression which took some weeks to lift. Poor lamb. She's never understood her Dad's reminders that, "the map is not the territory," until now. The homeland of the mind is rich and wonderful, but the real landscape is inhabited by people who don't always fit into your fairyland imaginings of 'home'.

She told me just the other day that she feels as though she's "just about finished growing up" and is eager to come back to Brisbane to try her new wings. She's started to talk about home as a place in this city, not in the Scottish highlands. We'll see. For my tall, beautiful, pilgrim child I suspect 'home' will be something she will searching after for a while yet. It will only be when the picture she has in her head and the feeling she holds in her heart match the external world in a way she can't quite imagine yet....but what a search it may turn out to be!

The Dolls House as home

Tomorrow is my birhday - it falls on Easter Sunday around every 11 years - and today we've been roaming around the local shopping centres looking for birthday presents. I'm over 40 now, and surprise gifts are harder to come by because we have many of the things we dreamed about when we were younger.

When we were first going it we used to do competitive gift-giving. Both of us regarded ourselves as ingenious shoppers, and both of us LOVE giving presents. Indeed, we have both been guilty of pre-gifting: being unable to contain ourselves and giving the faboulous present early, then having to get another fabulous gift for the big day itself. In this way we've acquired huge Tibetan gongs and singling bowls; original Pirinese etchings; life-sized busts of Poseidon, Medusa and various Egyptian kings; reclining buddhas and gigantic Buddhist tankas...along with carved mirrors, antique furniture, and, and, and.....

...but there is one thing I've longed forthroughout my adult life - a proper dolls house.
When I was a small girl, my brother John made me the most magnificent dolls house. It was a huge, one-storey wooden house, carefully painted and even wired with electric lighting, and with a great, sloping red roof painted fire-engine red, which lifted right off the see all the rooms beneath. It looked very like a Frank Lloyd Wright ranch-style house and I loved it immediately and elevated John to "favourite brother" status which has never been revoked.

I played with it for years and years, and finally, reluctantly, gave it up to the younger sister of some friends, who loved it as much as I did. I was clearly too old for the thing and moved on to all the teenaged pursuits - but I never forgot it, and in my secret heart I regretted it. As an udult I still buy books and magazines associated with dollshouse crafts, and sometimes buy a pretty little piece of miniature antique furniture to put in the dolls house I'll buy myself...someday.

I wonder how much of the home renovation craze the world is in now is associated with "playing house" - thinking of our own homes as some kind of dollhouse. I know that when I first left home to live with my first-ever love (what was I thinking?) it often felt that we were playing house rather than living together. We bought things because thtey were things grown ups were supposed to have. We had dinner parties for friends where all of us felt rather fraudulent - like little kids dressed in Mummy's high heels - but we persisted because we wanted to be seen as sophisticated adults. We cooked, made bread and preserves, bought rediculous pieces of furniture and pretended that our Wendy House was the finest in Never Land.

But eventually Wendy grows up and even the Lost Boys have to get a haircut and get a real job. I left university for the real world, found a profession I was surprisingly good at, and GOT SERIOUS (Hem Hem.) Before I knew it I was dressing like someone much older than we, thinking seriously about important things like business plans and social inequality and annual budgets and I forgot the way to Never Land. I lived in sensible houses filled with functional things and could serously tell myself that a chair was "a good investment," without flinching.

And then the strangest thing happened. Peter Pan flew into my office and everything changed.

I met my husband the day before my thirtieth birthday because my company had hired him to do some consultancy work. He walked into my office for our first briefing and I recall clearly my thoughts at my first sight of him. "Bugger. My life was going so well too - now I'm going to have to get a divorce and marry him!"...and that is precisely what happened - with a lot of complicated details which I'll save for another day.

And now I live, not in a Wendy House, but certainly in a magical, fanciful, beautiful, eclectic, slightly scruffy mini-mansion with my Pan, my Svengali, my Byron, my Apollo - my ineffably wonderful husband. But the thing which makes me happiest is that this isn't a dolls house - its a real, and satisfying and authentic life...something I always thought was incompatible with adult life.

I still want a dolls house, but I think it will have a completely different meaning to me than before. Instead of living in an adult-sized dolls house as a replacement for real life I think I'd like to build a little wooden dollshouse and decorate it to mimick my real house - because it will t be a homage to our wonderful life together, and because it will be just plain fun.

9th April 2004
Secrethouses@ptusnet.com.au

Neighbourhood Rites

It's midafternoon on Good Friday and the neighbourhood is absolutely silent. I haven't seen or heard a motor vehicle all day. There are no sounds of children at play. No one is whistling for the dog - in fact there hasn't even been a barking dog or so much as a birdcall all day. A plane passed ovrhead a little while back but it was high and faint and other-worldy.

You'd be a bit hard-pressed to call Australia a "Christian" nation; holy days represent a great excuse for hitting the beach or holding a BBQ or practically ANYTHING other than going to church. Around 74% of people identified themselves as Christian in the last census, but what people say and what they do is another matter. You're never likely to be woken by the sound of church-bells for example...we simply don't do that here.

Dont get me wrong - folks are pretty law-abiding, nice to each other, followers of the rules and so on. They're also amazingly tolerant of difference - you can be Morman, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Moslem; Scientologist; you can be an Athiest, and Agnostic, a "Calathumpian" for all we care, so long as you don't start asking questions like, "have you taken Jesus as your personal saviour?", or "any idea where I can buy 100 kilos of ammonium nitrate?" - at which point people's tolenance begins to run out.

But Good Friday seems to strike a deep chord with people here and until at least late afternoon everything stops and people stay indoors and do whatever it is that their consciences tell them to do - as long as they do it quietly.

There has been one exception to this silent contemplation today. Norah mowed her lawn.

Many neighbourhoods have a Norah, or a Frank, or "that damn family acorss the street who should be shot": the local trouble-makers, lunatics or offenders-against-propiety. Who knows why they are as they are, but they are the grit in the otherwise smooth machinery of live-and-let-live local existence.

Poor old Norah is quite mad - good old fashioned certified crazy - and believes that everyone else in the street is out to kill her, steal her possessions and burn her house down. The way we know this is because she is constantly telling us so, at the top of her lungs, with some colourful language thrown in, at all hours of the day or night. To put it mildly, Norah is a bit of a problem.

Over the years people have tried all kinds of things to deal with her. Folks have called the police so often that they don't even bother showing up any more. People have tried ignoring her, making friends, yelling back, blowing trumpets, ringing bells, holding meetings.....you get the idea.

The folks on the other side of her moved away recently - worn down by the torrents of accusation and abuse and they never figured out what they'd done to set her off.

The poor fellow who moved in began receiving the same treatment from day one and went from house to house asking people, "what on earth is wrong with the woman, and what did I do?" The best we could do was exchange a few war stories, pat him on the hand sympathetically and suggest he try to get out of his new lease. Now he's just like the rest of us - a battle-hardened veteran who does the best he can.

But (other than Norah) this is a lovely place to live. The streets are wide and tree-lined and run up and down the hillside landscape, creating pleasing little culdesacs and avenues and loops, with plenty of places for local children to play safely in the middle of the road. When our daughter was younger she used to create huge chalk-drawings of castles and motes, and write funny messages in three-foot high letters to surprise the occasional passing car.

We don't really know any of our neighbours (except Norah), but we still nod hello as we pass, or wave from the car window, pat their dogs, and watch with neighbourly warmth as local babies take their first steps, learn their first street games, and step out in their first school uniforms for the big adventure of primary school. There's a Roman Catholic Ladies College (that's a highschool to you) at the top of the street and every weekday during term we all watch a noisy crocodile of green-uniformed girls going to and from the train station.

I guess you'd call this an "upscale" neighbourhood - deeply middle-class in its behaviours and inner workings. This is "lawyer land" and comes equipped with all the expected trappings, large colonial-era homes, expensive late-model cars, and a local shopping precinct which bristles with so many sidewalk cafes and restaurants that its hard to just walk down the high street without interrupting dozens of late breakfasts, mid-morning coffee catchups, long lunches or afternoon liaisons - all of them running into and through one another in a sort of elaborate social stream of consciousness.

To tell the truth I feel rather out of place in this endless tableau of social-posing. I'm the kind of person who thinks sidewalk dining is all very well in Paris, but this is a LONG way from Paris; and it all seems a little contrived to me...as if people need to prove their personal economic success by eating overpriced sushi and drinking overpriced cafe lattes in the middle of the street....but cest la vie....it keeps the money in circulation I guess.

Thursday April 8th, 2004
secrethouses@optusnet.com.au

Thoughts about front doors

I love our front door. I loved it from the first time I saw the house on a drive-past, looking for houses to rent. With no fuss or flourish this humble entryway seemed to put a welcoming smile on the whole house nd made me want to move in immediately.

It's on the left hand side of the house and approached by a long flight of wooden stairs which rise between old fashioned conifers on one side and a dripping, drooping flower-covered native mellaluca on the other; so that halfway up the stairs you pass under cool shade and feel that you've moved through the first entry point before you're even under the eaves.

The top step comes to an enclosed wooden porch with a twelve foot ceiling and room for a wicker chair. We've hung framed photographs here and the space seems to float somehow between outside and inside - a perfect place to stop and think and shift from the outside self to the inside self, and back again.

The door is tall and elegant with four frosted glass panes high in its paneled face and an old-fashioned doorbell ringer which never works, but is great for hanging Christmas wreaths.

This entrance is the perfect, hospitable staging post for visitors. Friends like it because it always offers a welcome and a chance to pause and rearrange their parcels or their mood before moving through. Strangers - salesmen, new neighbours, charity collectors or whoever else, appreciate the wide cool porch which gives welcome relief from the Queensland sun and offers them a breeze and a pleasant spot to linger as they go about their business. I've found that this entryway encourages people to relax and allows even folks who are bristling with their own self-importance (like police officers and bill collectors!) to stop, calm down and communicate on a more human and humane level.

It's also a splendid proscenium arch - making the step across our threshold into the wood-paneled front room a rather exciting one - it creates a definite sense of having 'arrived' and feelings of occasion and sanction and welcome.

Our porch is also the place where all the local butcherbirds, magpies, drongos and other native birds know they can come and enjoy fresh meat and cheese - courtesy of my husband's several-daily feeding sessions. We've come to know and love these birds by name, and even distinguish individuals and their different personalities and foibles - a pretty neat trick when one critter seems pretty well indistinguishable from all the rest.
The birds are welcome to come into the house, and do so fearlessly. Indeed, on very hot or very wet days we sometimes have avian visitors who hang around the porch for hours, safe from the weather, near the food, and completely at ease with our family of flightless humans.

I've been reading that American front-doors are becoming a bit of an anachronism because so many people exit directly from their cars into their houses via a garage, or a back or side door.
Apparently people very rarely use their own front doors, and, since it seems that strangers are unwelcome and threatening creatures, people actively discourage visits to their houses by anyone but close friends or trusted tradespeople. This means that the front door is no longer the "face I present to the street", but rather a kind of redundant limb (like an appendix); everyone has one, but the would prefer that it remain quiet, unutilised and, if necessary, quietly removed.

Australia is, as I've said, a more relaxed place and we're just as likely to use the front door as the back; and expect complete strangers to knock fairly regularly - without immediately expecting them to rob or assault us.

Only family and close friends would think of announcing themselves at the back door - because it is usually the back part of the house - with a door leading to the favourite Aussie retreat, the "back yard" - which is the heart of family life and the centre of activity.

We like to have a 'public' and a family face here; but we move from one to the other very rapidly so that strangers can quickly become included in our private lives once the ceremonies have been properly observed. Australians must seem almost foolhardily generous with our time and possessions when it comes to helping neighbours or making friends out of complete strangers - but then we do not have a high crime rate here; guns are something we see on TV, not a feature of anyone's daily life, and the climate tends to encourage laziness rather than nervous tension and attention.

The American style apartment building is also largely unknown here. Homes - even in medium to high density areas - are usually open to the sky on two to four sides. We live in home units, "six-pack" unit blocks, cluster-housing two storey townhouses which we to call "villages". But they always have at least a front and a back door which open onto open gardens and driveways. The larger cities have begun to feature upmarket highrises which are probably close to the American model - but they are expensive and have only limited marketability to well paid young couples and a few early-retirees.

You see, these places are just, well, "unAustralian".
Most Aussies love the outdoors, especially beaches, rainforests and 'the Bush'. People hike, camp, bushwalk, visit national parks and generally have a strong, if difficult to articulate connection with the great outdoors. People dream of retiring to beachside suburbs or to country towns within driving distance of the coast. They like being near parks and sportfields, and to know that there are places for their kids to run around and play under the wide sky.

So living in a place which you have to enter through a fancy foyer, taking an elevator (we call them lifts) to a hallway lined with anonymous, featureless doors with spyholes is, well, not something we want to do. We like our front gates, our front yards and our front doors. We like to look as if we're happy to see you - whoever you are - and might invite you to our next barbecue on the strength of one meeting on our front verandahs.

So feel free to knock at my front door sometime - you can help me feed the magpies.

7 April, 2004. Shopping in the neighbourhood

I started this blog to consider what 'home' means to me, and what part the various elements parts of a house play in my feelings of well-being and comfort and how houses in general effect the way people seek privacy and engage with their neighbours and the rest of the word.

I'm only now realising that neighbourhoods and communities for part of my own feeling of 'home'.

My husband is a great believer in shopping locally. He always tries to by everything we need from local businesses owned by local people - even preferring to avoid chain stores in favour of smaller, sometimes more expensive vendors. His reasoning is that money spent here is more likely to stay here, and keeping the wealth in the local economy means better buildings, better services, work for local kids and all the trappings of a pleasant community.

Today is the Wednesday before Easter and we've just finished a run around the shops. First was the local doctor - where we talked about each other's children, had a laugh, and, almost incidentally, arranged our flu shots and had a pre-holiday health check. We weren't charged for our visit. My husband has a chronic illness, and the Family Clinic is concerned enough about him to see him quickly and treat him for free whenever they think his condition is worsening.

After that it was the pharmacy for another long chat, shared Easter holiday plans, and prescriptions. I called out a general farewell and was answered by a chorus of "Happy Easter" from the six staff. It was the same in the bakery, the grocery store and the bank. We all know each other, like each other, serve each other and support each other with our money, our products and our skills.

How many people in the Western world still have this kind of easygoing "village" community to be part of? Australia is a wonderful place to live, and Brisbane seems positively blessed compared to other urban Centres.

I feel deeply troubled when I watch, for example, American television, and see how alientated people seems to be from their environment. Last week we watched a documentary about an Emergency Department somewhere in New York. A young shopkeeper was brought in, close to death from gunshot and knife wounds, sustained when one of his regular customers suddenly attacked and robbed him.

The TV crew visited the crime scene and we were horrified to see that this small shop looked more like a prison than a place to buy bread and milk. The building had no windows at all, and the front door was guarded by a heavily barred door. The counter was entirely enclosed by (supposedly) bullet-proof glass, with only a tiny slit for exchanging money and goods.

Do people really own shops like this? Do people really shop in them?

Our local shops, large or small, are brightly lit by natural light. They are spacious and relaxed places with wide, low counters, open back-areas where staff and customers can call to each other, and cash registers in the middle of the store. No one has guns. Very few places have bars on doors or windows, and then only at night, and security means putting the alarm on and locking the glass-fronted door for the night.

Australia is a relaxed place. In Brisbane our "personal space" - the distance we keep between ourselves and others in the street, on the train, wherever - is around three or four feet. It's the tropical heat, mostly - we give each other room to catch the breeze - but it also leads to a very relaxed, live-and-let-live commerce between people.
Maybe Americans and Britons huddle closer together for warmth and that's why people are much snappier with each other. The proximity must be stressful. But I still don't understand why you folks in the northern hemisphere seem so much more alienated from each other, and from the people in your local community?

Maybe you'd like to tell me what your local shopping centre, school or community centre is like? I want some more reconnaissance on this. do you feel happy and safe and connected in your neighbourhood, and why, or why not? Email me at secrethouses@optusnet.com.au. More of this later....

The Front Door.

My house is a little art-deco jewelbox, set amongst trees near the Brisbane river. I fell in love with it at first sight - with its pretty gables, elegent frosted-glass windows and smiling front door and knew I had to live in it. I knew that this house reflected who I am and how I want to live more clearly than any place I's lived in since I was a child.

That deep certainty and instant attraction started me thinking about the "meaning" of houses, and why we can be so happy in one place and so miserable in another even though, at bottom a house is a house is a house, and the fanciest ones only vary from the most utilitarian in degree.

I want to use this blog to think about houses, homes and domestic spaces and try to decide why we feel as we do about our houses - what makes them into homes.