Suburbs

These are the suburbs, the world we actually live in: the local beach or park, the corner shop, the servo, the pub, the bus seat in a street. The interiors of the fibro houses, those cupboards, wallpaper, furnishings, the venetian blinds, bedspreads, décor, ‘that vase’, are objects and spaces we know.

I learn that I have not made the interview stage for the role I had been performing for years prior. I walk to Campsie to meet with J, a former housemate, for a sauna, to sweat and swear. Like G, J has taken a ‘voluntary separation package’ from a different institution, and seems transformed since absconding from the academy. We strip off and I vent my spleen in the steam.

If the photograph, as Susan Sontag claims, is a note-taking form, then these images are notes on suburbia. Suburbia not just as a place but as a way of thinking and living, a lens through which we can see the world and understand our place within it; suburbia as a possibility.

How could I forget the rules? I put them in place in my very own Introvert’s Guide to Surviving an Arab Family of Extroverts. It’s not a document that anyone can see or get hold of, rather it’s the way I’ve broken things down to guide my anxiety and me along. Oh, and the extroverts are a loud, 25-strong Lebanese clan – all of us living in three houses side by side on the same street in Punchbowl, South Western Sydney, roaming freely onto each other’s properties with detached fences and clearly no boundaries.

Growing up, I saw negative media depictions of Asians and migrants and I didn’t want to be lumped into the same category as them. I didn’t want to confront questions of race and belonging. I didn’t want to examine my identity and culture, particularly how I inhabited both a problematic settler culture and the Chinese-Cambodian culture of my family. I was sure that meaning and purpose was not to be found where I came from in western Sydney. When I got older, I longed to be part of the middle-class north shore of the city where my sociology lecturers came from, or the cultured and hip crowd in the inner west, or the white beach-life of Manly. These places seemed to offer possibilities of other worlds where I could finally be other than what I was. People from these places didn’t seem to have deal with questions of belonging and identity.

In October 2017 I led twenty people around the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. It was a guided walk, but unlike any most in the group had experienced before. Mine was one of five walks in a public arts project aimed to facilitate aural attentiveness to our environment

After Sydney house prices and rents skyrocketed in the 1990s and early 2000s and never came back down, Marrickville’s large, empty warehouses became an attractive alternative to sharehousing – especially for artists in need of space.

In the process of writing, clutter accumulates. A writer’s clutter can be physical, like the bundles of papers, notes, and books on my desk. It can be processual: the swarm of edits on the marked-up page of a draft, or the ‘offcuts’ file of this essay which is longer than the essay itself. It can be digital – a cluttered computer desktop, hundreds of browser bookmarks, accumulations of draft files – or mental, in the psychic turbulence of the process, in the ideas never followed through, in digressions and tangents and distractions.

I need to go back to that daylight encounter in Homer Street and walk up to that fox, and look it in the eye. I need to have a better conversation with that fox, a more honest one.

I started reading The Trial after my apartment building’s last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding.