Home

A little slice of living.

Home’s a funny idea, don’t you think? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you simply accept that your home is made of walls and the roof above your head, the place you spend time in, and decorate to your liking.

I’m Cancerian, so apparently home is important to me. And it is! Deeply. For years, I dreamt about the home I grew up in on the outskirts of Inverell, rural NSW. When I went back to visit four years ago, though, my dreams evaporated. Not in a dramatic way. Just, I never had a dream set there again.

I think about the many homes I’ve lived in. But not just think — feel, like they live in my bones.

When my daughter was born, we bought and moved into my grandma’s home. (We slept there the night of her wake and kept staying.)

In those days, we didn’t have much money. All our furniture was inherited, and we made the paintings ourselves. I sometimes got frustrated that things weren’t as nice as they could be. But when my daughter called it the Sunshine House, and told me that our home was magic, I preferred to see it through her eyes.

As my career grew, and we had more money, we renovated, and finally, about a year or so ago, our home was exactly how I wanted it. I even had bought a new couch, agonising as the decision was. It was the first bit of new furniture we ever bought. At the end of the year, we left it all as nice as it’s ever been and moved to Europe.

Now, I live in a one-room garage with my family of four amongst my sister in law’s things. We each have a corner of the room for our bed, our cupboard, and a bedside table. Each corner looks different and is unique to us. One daughter’s corner is creative but messy, decorated with Billie Eilish knick-knacks and cluttered with art supplies. My other daughter’s corner is neat and tidy, ‘aesthetic’ as she calls it, with cream and white bedding and pastel art she’s made herself. My husband’s corner is random, filled with books and reading glasses. And mine’s soft floral shades and dried flowers.

Despite the occasional grumble about a small, shared space, considering our kids are teenagers, we’re all doing pretty well. Because it’s funny what you get used to. Actually, I like our glorified camping, our cosy space. The little routines we make for ourselves—making coffee in the workshop and pancakes in the kitchen. Buying flowers once a week from the market to make the room cheery and smell nice. We neighbour a gigantic woodland, so I’ll go for daily runs and walks. On the other end of the street are some of my favourite gardens in the world, where I’ve spent a lot of the girls’ childhood. On warm evenings, we sit out in the courtyard to eat. There’s a gelato shop across the road. I work on my bed for hours, propped up with cushions, my flask at my fingertips.

This week, I’ve moved to an upstairs loft to look after my neighbour’s plants. Her space is creative, spacious, aesthetic and intentional. I never want to leave. Words are pouring out. And maybe it’s the space, the wall colour, the plants. Maybe it’s luck. Maybe it’s me.

We’ve lived in borrowed spaces many times over the years. My daughter’s first room was someone’s walk-in wardrobe. She fell asleep to the the words of Florence & Fox stories tapped on a keyboard. I wrote Queenie in Seven Moves in the fifth space we’d lived in that summer, a friend’s downstairs one-bedroom apartment. Their daughter played a passionate version of Chopsticks beside me the whole time I wrote. I wrote Hazel’s Treehouse on a friend’s verandah to the sound of birds, my notebook bathed in morning light.

My favourite years were perhaps those spent on my parents’ property in Brooklet. There, we had it all—aesthetic space, (lots of it), a rural property, native birds, a television, and a wonderful rural community where kids scattered across the lawn, ran through forests and climbed trees. I’ll forever be trying to get back there.

Queenie learns through her journey that home comes with you wherever you go. I believe that deeply. Although I occasionally wake in the clutches of grief, thinking about my Brooke Clunie teacups, my coffee machine, my paper daisy garden and my grandma’s rose bush, I know I’m happy wherever I am, even if the space isn’t perfect or isn’t mine. As much as anything, home is made of the people who come with you.

Years ago, Gregor had a vivid dream that an alien visited him and delivered him a message: The true pathway to happiness is to get rid of all the houses and move to the forest. While I’m not giving up on walls and roofs just yet, I kind of understand what the alien meant.

Being a writer is liberating. You need a flask of tea, a laptop and notebook. When the words flow, you don’t need much else, although a local forest doesn’t hurt.

I’d love to hear what home means to you.