New Again

Let me begin with an anecdote: it is our first night in the new house, and I’m walking in the dark across our bedroom.  

Let me begin again. It is not a new house, but it’s new to my partner and me. Our new house is like our old house, in the sense that many other people have lived here before us. The house has been rented for years, and we can see traces of change everywhere – on the walls, around the new air-conditioners and downstairs toilet, are halos of lighter paint that show what colour the house used to be, and rough oblongs of seventies shag carpet still line the bottoms of the wardrobe and linen closet, though it’s gone from the rest of the house. There is a sunroom at the back that has been repurposed as a bedroom, with flimsy walls and a door not quite square to the jamb, but what’s most striking to me about this house is the floor. There are floorboards under the new carpet, and as I walk slowly in the dark I can feel and hear how uneven they are, how they lift and lower slightly under my weight, making a kind of askew music.  

Someone else is in the room with me. It’s Freud, who wrote in 1919 about walking around in a familiar room in the dark, bumping against the same piece of furniture over and over. It is my favourite anecdote from his famous essay ‘The Uncanny’, which is Freud’s attempt to define a phenomenon that is inherently strange and difficult to describe: a clash of the familiar and unfamiliar, a sense of dread or fear emerging in places meant to be safe and comfortable, a haunting or discomfort or uncertainty about what’s real or not, or a bringing to light of what’s been hidden away. This summary leaves out so much, of course: that’s the uncanny’s trap. It’s always more than anyone can articulate; it always leads the writer astray. Freud says in the essay that his plan is to try to define what the uncanny is, but this turns out to be impossible. What’s so satisfying about ‘The Uncanny’, as many other writers and scholars have also observed, is its own uncanniness: Freud’s definitions are partial or elaborate, his anecdotes sometimes seem to reveal more than they were intended to, and he is often waylaid, turned around, saying one thing but doing another. The uncanny is anecdotal: it hinges on stories about odd experiences, a half-intuited sense that something isn’t quite right. Freud writes that ‘the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in’. I think of him in every new house I move to, when I get up at night and try to find my way to my desk. I think of him when I feel the floorboards shift under my feet just enough to make me tread carefully.   

This has happened before. I have lived in half a dozen houses like this: recently, clumsily, hastily renovated. Nicholas Royle writes that ‘[t]he uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning is already haunted.’ In nearly fifteen years of renting in the inner suburbs of Brisbane, I’ve collected plenty of anecdotes about rentals that haven’t been renovated at all, or haven’t been renovated properly – my friends and I all have stories about houses without working locks, bathrooms with black mould, taps that don’t turn on, doors that don’t close properly, flooded basements, holes in walls. Every new house I’ve moved into has borne traces of Australia’s obsession with renovation, an obsession which now sits uncomfortably alongside the increasingly difficult conditions for renters. I’m used to things not working properly, used to moving every year, used to finding these patchy, palimpsestic signs of the house’s past intervening in the present. When I get up at night, I think of the title poem in Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017), in which the speaker describes learning ‘to walk bruiseless through the dark’ of rented houses. Though I get up most nights, it will be months before the path through this house begins to feel familiar. Then a few months later we’ll receive news our rent is going up, and a few months after that we will move again.    

Let me begin again. I am reading a novel about the renovation of a church. In it, a woman agonises over what to do with this church, which her husband was passionately invested in converting to a home. The church is excessive, overwhelming, full of the presences of the known and unknown dead, the traces of former use. The woman is aware that it is haunted by things she cannot yet confront, and the question of how to renovate such a place hovers over her throughout the novel. Like The Conversion (2023), Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (2020) is also a renovation novel: the story of a woman coming to grips with great personal trauma and attempting to re-organise the space around her in order to respond to, and contend with, the changes in her life.  

Stories like this – about both the symbolic and physical dimensions of renovation – are a national obsession. Most often they appear on TV: in programs like The Block, House Rules, Grand Designs, and a host of American counterparts, the premise of renovating a house establishes a comfortable narrative arc that equates the practice of improving the house with improving the self. Lohrey herself, as she discussed in a 2021 lecture titled ‘Grand Designs: writing the domestic dwelling in the novel’, is fascinated with renovation as a cultural phenomenon in Australia, where, despite a housing crisis, the rising cost of living, and thirteen successive interest rate rises, renovation remains an exceptionally popular national pastime. In the September quarter of 2023, Australians spent more than three billion on house renovations. In January last year, Domain.com predicted that 2024 would be the ‘year of the home renovation’ in defiance of rising costs of labour and construction materials – little, it seems, can diminish the interest in renovation in this country, though much of the money, it must be said, is being spent in Australia’s wealthiest suburbs.  

Domain.com and its ilk tell their own stories about what renovating in Australia looks like, but books lead us astray: we find ourselves in an unfamiliar place, encountering an alternative reality where this cultural phenomenon complicates, rather than satisfies, the desire to dwell comfortably, to assume total control over the space of the home. The Conversion and The Labyrinth both position renovation not as an act of personal renewal, but as an encounter with what is strange and unheimlich – unhomely – about dwelling in contemporary Australia. Both follow older women in relatively stable financial positions, even if their personal and professional lives are in varying states of disarray. The protagonists of these novels are single women who move to small rural communities, purchase a property, and then undertake the complex work of grappling with the traumatic past and the unknown future in, and through, their houses and backyards. Lohrey’s women are wary, sensible, self-sufficient. They’re thinking people, unsettled by their loneliness and isolation in the country towns they end up in, and admirably cautious about undertaking overly ambitious plans for their houses. This caution is the most interesting facet of Lohrey’s renovations: where frequently renovation narratives on TV are about excess, overwhelm, chaos, and limitless – even absurd – ambition, there’s an orderliness to the approaches her protagonists, Erica and Zoe, each take. Much research is involved and digested at length in both novels before any (re)construction happens, as well as detailed conversations with friends from the city who have a longstanding interest in philosophical or architectural ideas about dwelling, or with neighbours in the country who happen to know a local guy with the know-how.  

Lohrey’s renovation novels are distinctive for their concern with the unsatisfying qualities of renovation – and while Zoe never actually ends up converting the church, the church does convert her to a more resigned, muted acceptance of her husband’s infidelity and death. What Erica manages with her backyard labyrinth is not only underwhelming but impermanent – the sense is that sooner or later the waves will come in and wash the stones away. The novels, as I read them, are reminders of the fundamentally uncanny resonances of renovating in Australia, on country where the settler figure is always already not-at-home, anxious, unsettled, and in landscapes that are constantly under the threat of environmental depredation and ecological collapse. Renovation may be an attempt to confront and perhaps exorcise the ghosts of the past, but the uncanny, as Royle writes, involves ‘a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property’. 

All renovations are haunted. Literature is always bringing to light what Domain.com conspires to keep hidden. Departing, for a moment, from Australia, we encounter strange and uncanny renovations in the work of Annie Proulx, Jennifer Egan, Rachel Cusk, Lauren Elkin, Alison Bechdel, Jonathan Franzen, Banana Yoshimoto. In Yoshimoto’s The Premonition, published in 1988, the renovation of Yayoi’s family home seems to stir up something lost or repressed – a memory that she has forgotten comes back. In Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993), Quoyle and his family travel to Newfoundland and begin renovating the family’s ancestral home. Such a practice unearths long-buried family wounds, and the past returns to haunt the family and the house, which is eventually swept away in a great storm – much as the house at the end of The Conversion is relinquished, albeit much less dramatically, by Zoe. Where Proulx’s version is Gothic in its evocation of an ancient house and a cataclysmic storm, Lohrey’s is unmistakably Australian in its mixing of the financial and personal. The house, though threatened by a nearby fire, does not burn down like a Gothic manor; it’s damaged but covered, of course, by insurance, as any dwelling belonging to a sensible middle-class owner might be expected to be. It’s not lost forever but put on the market and sold to another pair of city dwellers looking to make a move to the regions – buyers who immediately commence renovating the church, transforming it into a high-end restaurant serving local produce. 

Renovation is about the uncanny act of repetition. The word means to come alive again, from the Latin re, meaning again, and novare, to make new. It is contradictory, a fundamentally impossible task: to make new again. To reanimate. It not only brings together but binds the past – what we want to remember along with what we might seek to repress or hide – to the present. Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) that ‘renovation does not, ultimately, know what it is bringing back – or what it is destroying – when it restores the references or fragments of elusive memories’. We don’t really know what’s happening when we renovate, because the old house – and the old self – is always there, and long-buried questions about the unhomeliness of settler Australia are unearthed. David Malouf, in his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street (1985), writes about his childhood home at the eponymous address in South Brisbane. He writes that: 

Malouf’s renovated childhood home persists in his memory; it overrides the later version of the house and can’t be dislodged. To haunt, as Rachel Carley puts it,  

Carley is writing about Rachel Whiteread’s 1990 artwork Ghost, a plaster cast of the interior of a Victorian terraced house. The room is no longer space that we can enter, move around in, adapt for our own use and comfort, but rather resistant to entry and visibility.  

Renovation is a powerful narrative structure because it is connected to the house, one of the most complex and powerful symbols of the self, a container of both experience and memory. In Lisa Gorton’s sequence ‘Room and Bell’ from her collection Hotel Hyperion, a similar recurrence emerges:  

Here, in the first ten lines of this poem (the final one in the sequence), the renovation interferes in complex ways with how the speaker encounters and recognises herself in the places where we are most at home – places we might know so well that they cannot be forgotten, that they persist in place of the new house.  

One night I see a startling thing on Instagram: a picture of my own house, the one in which I’m sitting on the lounge, scrolling on my phone. Below the picture, a price. No other news reaches us until weeks later, when an agent calls to tell us we must not be at home on Saturdays, because from now on there will be house inspections. We shouldn’t worry, the agent says. The house is being sold off market, to investors. I have heard this story before. When we get home on Saturday afternoons nobody’s there, but I’m conscious of their traces. Sometimes investors send their proxies – buyer’s agents with iPhones who film in our bedroom, our wardrobes, our bathrooms. I know that at house inspections people open cupboards and drawers, that sometimes they’ll simply sit down on the couch.   

I know this because, like everyone else, I’m spending my Saturdays looking for a house. We have decided to try buying instead of finding leases year on year. For months I go every Saturday to look at houses. Here I am, standing in someone else’s rented house while someone is standing in mine. There is an apartment building in Chermside that I have been to three times this month. Every time, the same woman receives me. Every time, there is a crowd. It is a narrow street with no parking because a block of apartments is being built next door, and two Queenslanders covered in scaffolding sit down the street. The woman asks my name, which she copies into her app. My name and phone number appear. You’re here already, she says. Each of the apartments looks the same. The bedrooms all have one long slim limb with a desk at the end, barely longer than it is wide. Above it, a window that opens a fraction so you can glimpse the construction site next door. Why do I keep coming back here? I leave again.  

Over the course of four months, I inspect over ninety houses. I drive from one suburb to the next; I design byzantine inspection schedules allowing me to see multiple houses in a half-hour inspection slot. After I finish my inspections on Saturdays I sit in the car for a while, updating my spreadsheet, writing detailed descriptions of the houses I’ve seen, eating a meat pie. I note the prices of houses that have since sold, or on which our offers were declined. I highlight certain suburbs, block off others where the prices have become too extravagant. Then I drive home, where the landlord pops in and out at random on weekends because he lives nearby and likes to do little odd jobs around his property. The house, when I come home on Saturday afternoons, never looks quite the same as it did when I left it.    

You can renovate a building, and this means renewing it or restoring it. But at different times in history you could also renovate a wardrobe or a garment; you could renovate a law or a musical score or a patient’s blood or unproductive soil. You could renovate the soul – which, as in Lohrey’s The Conversion, is ultimately what most renovation narratives are about. The idea of spiritual rebirth animates two immensely popular memoirs published in the late 80s and mid 90s: Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) and Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), both of which follow middle-class white folks as they move to an idyllic European location, encounter the quirky but endearing locals, and recover in some way from the ravages of modernity through the act of renovating a charming and rustic dwelling. Since then, the appetite for such narratives – where renovation not only refreshes but repairs the traumatised self – has not diminished.  

Renovation in contemporary Australia retains this notion of renewal and rebirth, but it’s also fundamentally about fear and security. Fiona Allon, in her book Renovation Nation (2008), suggests that in twenty-first century Australia renovation is particularly compelling because it allows homeowners to turn away from the terrors of an increasingly volatile world, towards the controllable space of the home. Allon writes:  

The repressed anxieties of settler Australia return to haunt us through this obsession with renovating the home, with reiterating and reestablishing dominance over it. Lohrey is not the only Australian author to have taken an interest in the complexities of renovation in one of the world’s foremost homeownership societies. In Kristen Tranter’s novel Hold (2016), the protagonist’s partner’s stylishly renovated modern house feels strangely uncomfortable, until she discovers a small, unrenovated room which begins to obsess her, and seems to call up the ghost of her husband who passed away years ago. Backyard renovations appear in the sinister 70s suburbs of Sonya Hartnett’s Golden Boys (2014), as well as in the wild schemes of picaresque figures in Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985) and Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole (2008). In all of these novels – and others – renovation becomes a means through which the characters grapple with a fundamental uncanniness in their lives. In Hartnett’s novel, for example, Rex Jenson’s backyard renovations are a malicious pre-echo of the work Erica undertakes in The Labyrinth. While Erica’s labyrinth is her attempt to resolve and recentre her life, Rex is a paedophile who, in adding a pool and re-landscaping the backyard, is using renovation to attract young boys to his house under the guise of building an ideal landscape for his sons to enjoy.  

Rebirth, ancestral connections, family bonds: these are so often at the heart of renovation narratives. Scott Cam’s job is to stomp around the houses in each season of The Block invoking the image of the Australian family – barbecues, space for the kids to run around, room for the grandparents – which is one way the show justifies the increasingly outlandish size and expense of the houses. But, here or abroad, literary renovations are often attempts to contend with, or repress, loss or injury: to stop or pause a renovation indefinitely is often a sign of insurmountable trauma, as is the case in Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding (2024), in which the psychoanalytic dimensions of renovation are particularly explicit. The novel’s protagonist is herself a psychoanalyst whose apartment renovation has stalled – along with her relationship and her job – after a miscarriage. A similar narrative is at work in Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow (2024), set in Melbourne, where the years-long renovation of the family home has been left unfinished in the aftermath of the accidental death of Ruby, the family’s youngest daughter. 

Often in such novels, resuming work on a stalled renovation symbolises resolution: characters are able, in completing the project, to live with their loss, and in renovating they choose to continue to have a place in the world. In Rebecca Starford’s The Visitor (2025), it is the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist Laura’s parents that prompts her to return to the family home in Brisbane and renovate it. As in Lohrey’s novels, Starford mixes the financial sensibilities of the middle class – Laura begins to renovate the house not for herself but in order to sell it for a higher price – with the superstition and anxiety of the settler Australian attempting to feel at home: the house seems haunted, and this haunting is linked to all three living generations of the family.  

Casting a shadow over these ideas about the family and the family home is a familiar figure: Gaston Bachelard, whose book The Poetics of Space is so often called on to emphasise the centrality of houses to human memory, dreams, and relationships. Bachelard wrote that ‘house images move in two directions – they are in us as much as we are in them’, arguing that houses are our first and most beloved places in the world; through memory, they stay with us forever. I remember my childhood home, a three-bedroom house with a big yard, which my parents bought in 1991 for less than a hundred thousand dollars – a lot of money for them at the time. I was lucky to have had a home not unlike the idealised one Bachelard invokes, but I like what Royle says better: that the uncanny is ‘a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property’ – that the things we think belong to us (our own names, our loved ones, our houses, our legal or political institutions, our names for places) are never stable; that things we know so well can change entirely. I go back to Lismore, my hometown, and my dad tells me that my childhood house has been renovated and sold for over six hundred thousand last year. I drive past, curious, but I get a little lost, just as Freud in ‘The Uncanny’ tells the story of getting lost in a neighbourhood he’s visiting. I drive up and down a few times until I find the right number. It looks sleek and familiar: I’ve seen this Box Modern style on Instagram, on The Block, in the suburbs of Brisbane. I barely recognise it.   

The day before the sale of my rented house settled, the new owners arrived to re-inspect the property. I was home, working at my desk upstairs, but they did not come up and I did not go down. I knew our time in the house was over when I heard the whirr of a tape measure being extended and retracted in our kitchen.  

Now I drive past what was once our house on the way to work and see skips outside with the blue laminate countertops cracked like stone tablets. How many nights I spent obsessively wiping them down: their porous surface would hold turmeric, passata, beetroot. Anything we ate seemed close to permanent. I was anxious, always, about the stain or scratch or break that would lose us our bond. Who is at home there? We never saw their faces, only the real estate agent’s voice through the phone. I think of the tape measure, its little silver claw gripping the ends of everything. 

Poems, as Walt Hunter writes in his book on American house poems, ‘tend to defamiliarize, not to reinforce, the way we look at things like houses – not as commodities to be flipped, but as dwelling-spaces with complex claims on our senses and imagination’. Many Australian poems have a similar effect: instead of the resolution-oriented narrative arcs of novels and memoirs, poems tend to lead the reader astray. They can tell us something about those flipped houses, or about renovating at a time when access to stable and secure housing is exceptionally difficult. In Michelle Cahill’s ‘Renovations’, from her book The Herring Lass (2016), the speaker is renovating a house in the ‘hellfire days’ of a Sydney summer after the breakdown of a marriage, and the speaker reflects on ‘all the brawn and Epoxy sealant it took to keep me single’. Zenobia Frost, by contrast, is preoccupied with contrasting renovation programs – and their snappy evocations of quick-flipped houses and slick hosts out to help the needy – with the tribulations of the rental market in inner-city Brisbane. In After the Demolition (2019), Frost’s poem ‘Reality on Demand’ takes up the voice of a house undergoing a televised renovation, where the show’s host hangs ‘a final pendant light / from my cervix’. The book’s subsequent poems take place not in the glossy half hour of Flip or Flop but in Toowong, Moorooka, and other Brisbane suburbs where creepy prospective housemates and utterly apathetic property managers show the speaker through a series of entirely unsuitable – if captivatingly idiosyncratic – rental houses. Frost’s evocation of unsettled suburbs and repulsive sharehouses might present a form of metaphorical renovation that troubles the aspirational projects dominating mainstream media.   

A similar type of renovation is at work in Louise Carter’s Golden Repair (2023), which charts a renovation of the self alongside a set of questions about homes and how they’re made, remade, and remade again. Speakers in these poems move ‘from one grubby share house to another’, encounter the ‘desecrated and gentrified’ domains of inner Sydney where ten years ago ‘us weirdos could afford the rent’, and situates its reader in troubled, unsettled spaces of memory, dwelling, and pain, where the body too is a damaged, unrenovated space. Golden Repair is full of suburban unease and stasis, relentless urban development, and the discomforts of sharehousing and renting. It is a book about precarity and its relationship to cultures of improvement (of the self, the home, the family and the body). Carter poses the question – which also lingers over Frost’s poems, not to mention Keri Glastonbury’s evocations of a renovated, gentrified city in Newcastle Sonnets (2018), and Wright’s ghostly rentals in Domestic Interior – of the uncanny situation renters find themselves in: how to be at home as a renter in a country obsessed with renovation?  

As with all renovations, the emotional and spiritual dimensions are as important as the physical ones. Carter invokes the idea of kintsukuroi, the Japanese practice by which broken pottery is repaired with gold-lacquered dust. Kintsukuroi draws attention to, rather than disguises, the history of breakage, suggesting that such damage is essential to the history of an object – or, as in the twenty-one-page sequence of poems that gives Carter’s book its title, the history of a relationship. Golden Repair is the third Australian book since 2022 to take up kintsukuroi as its central metaphor: Queensland poet Stephanie Green’s book Seams of Repair (2023) and Canberran poet Isi Unikowski’s 2022 debut Kintsugi also draw on this idea. Melbourne band #1 Dads released an album titled Golden Repair in 2020. Lana Del Rey has a song called ‘Kintsugi’ from her 2023 album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Artist Victor Solomon’s Kintsugi Court applies the technique to a much larger space, ‘renovat[ing] a dilapidated [basketball] court in South Los Angeles, filling its cracks with gold-dusted resin’. Carter’s book connects kintsukuroi to renovation, moving from the potentially sentimental terrain of spiritual recovery to the rapid large-scale redevelopment of buildings and suburbs. She suggests that practices of recognising – The Block’s judges might call this ‘honouring’ – the history of a place can make that place feel more, not less, alienating and uncanny.  

We buy a two-bedroom apartment next to a six-lane highway. Letters arrive even before we move in to say our mortgage payments are increasing. Nobody lives in the apartment next door. I watch a few plastic pots from Bunnings roll and roll on the otherwise empty balcony, thinking of the townhouse next door to our last rental: it was empty year-round and had a single sun-lounger set up in the yard to make it seem as if someone were at home. Even with those little absences, the streets I’ve lived in have been busy; there’s always been a house under renovation somewhere nearby. In this suburb it’s no different, except that the house is on the edge of the highway. Half its side has been shorn off, revealing open rooms like a dollhouse. Workers are expanding the rooms, adding an extra level. At night they strap tarps down, but still I can see the shapes of the people inside. Later they put up an enormous fence. 

On the day we move in, our apartment looks unfamiliar. The apartment was renovated before we bought it: new paint, new carpet, new curtains. Déjà vu: the carpet is rippled, doesn’t lie flat, so the ground feels uneven again. The apartment had been styled when I inspected it: a fantasy of Block-adjacent rented decor involving tedious wall hangings, a lounge room with no television, an art deco drinks trolley, chairs facing no view. Each room had been weighed down by the styling team’s idea of art: enormous twinned oblong images of women’s heads, gold palm fronds on a dark background. Now the heads and palms are gone and what’s left are screws driven in to every wall. When we pull them out, they are huge and plush as grubs, the white dust of plaster sifting from them, leaving eye-sized holes. Not knowing what else to do, and having no art because we have never been able to hang things on the walls of rentals, we leave the bolts as our only decorations for a time.   

Our loan period is thirty years but what’s important is not to dwell on this. The goal is to accrue further debt: to keep this property and buy another and then another, until we find ourselves in the right place, which is the place of the homeowner and landlord. Housing in Australia, as Allon writes, is not about buying and staying in a home; it’s about building wealth. Our apartment is not a good home but perhaps it will be a good investment. The news promises a rate cut.   

In our first weeks in the apartment, I keep coming back to the marks of former habitation around the place. New paint only covers so much, and the long scratches on tiles and dents in the countertop represent all the lost bonds that came before us. I begin to think we should get new benchtops. Soon I’m on YouTube trying to learn how to install new door handles. After work I shop for rugs online. I’d like to put shelves in the bedroom and laundry. On Saturdays, along with everyone not looking at buying houses, I find myself at Bunnings. 

Let me go back to Golden Repair. In it, renovation is happening at scale – gentrification. Sydney is the place being renovated in this collection, and such a renovation prompts the speaker to renovate her own methods of dwelling in the city. How to feel at home in this once-familiar place? In ‘Goldsbrough’, the speaker is sitting on the balcony in what was once a wool store on Darling Harbour, now a chain hotel and residential apartment complex. The arresting opening line, ‘The past is a multistorey car park’, is an image of a renovation that, so to speak, has not honoured the history of the place – the metaphor suggests that the intricacies of personal or collective history have been concreted over in service of ugly but functional structures.  

The speaker and her companion watch traffic pass on the streets below as the speaker reflects with anxiety on both the past and future, asserting that the location of the past is ‘not behind us but beside us, / an infinite horizon’. This image of an unsuperseded past adjacent to the present is central to the Goldsbrough, the gentrified building in which the poem is taking place. History, here, is both visible and obscured, manifest and latent (to use Freud’s terms): the buildings have not been knocked down and replaced with a car park, but their persistence into the present serves not to ‘honour’ the past but to expose its depredation. Carter’s final lines reveal the restlessness that has motivated the speaker:  

The poem’s millennial yearning for an assurance of stability rings clearly in the perfect rhyme of ‘okay’ and ‘today’ that closes the poem, and the Goldsborough – now an Oaks hotel – houses the mistakes of the past, that unrenovatable place.  

Sometimes we crave the disorder of the past when confronted with the seamlessly renovated present. Another of Carter’s poems describes Sydney’s Tramsheds, once a site of industry, then dereliction, where unused trams were kept in ‘shadowy neglect’, alluring to the speaker and her rebellious friends in their youth. Now, they are ‘Sydney’s Most Dynamic Food Destination’ (Carter’s italics). The speaker, having paid for an overcomplicated and overpriced sandwich made by trendy chefs, looks up in the final stanzas: 

The building, dating back to 1904, stands firm, while the interpretation of its structure and the incorporation of its aesthetics into the city have radically altered. In Carter’s poem, the renovation of the site speaks only of commodification – representative of the broader exodus of ‘us weirdos’ from inner city suburbs like Glebe. Smugly satisfied with its awareness of its past, the Tramsheds have moved up in the world, but the poem’s final stanza suggests there’s some comfort in the knowledge that such places are always undergoing transformation. They might be ‘unrecognisable’ for a time, but, as Carter’s speaker knows, this iteration, like the others preceding it, won’t last.  

I am writing one afternoon when someone knocks – a plumber wanting to turn off the water for an hour. The upstairs neighbours are renovating their bathrooms.  

I get up that night and walk to the next room to write something down. I am looking for the light switch. I remember which wall it is on. I slide my hand up and down the wall, where I think it must be, but the switch eludes me. I cross the threshold in the dark, and find the carpet is damp underfoot. Even without much light I can see water trickling down from the apartment above into our home.