Drafting

Abstract

Research aim

Background to the study

Approach

Context

Definition of terms

Overview of the literature

Research plan and methodology

Introduction

Original collage © Phoebe Boswell Hyde reproduced with permission

Abstract

This investigation of living in one suburban home in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia is located within a post qualitative and interpretive research framework which seeks to generate theory about self identity through dwelling. Specifically, data is derived from autotoethnography. Reflexivity and narrative inquiry are secondary procedures to explore lived accounts of home.

During the disruption of SARS-CoV-2, and subsequent lockdowns, domestic arrangements became politically heightened. While opting for early retirement, I wondered about the significance of home within a life course. Homing became a reflexive process to understand social and cultural shifts, as well as a means to reclaim the haven which I had come to own, ironically by being absent for most of my working life.

Research aim

The aim of this inquiry is to generate theory about the continuity and density of being in relation to understandings about home: an interpretive study. Home is defined by social, geographical, and political dynamics within a historical context, and this case study spans a particular life course, initiated at a key turning point. Context is critical.

The author-as-narrator serves as a guide, bricoleur and interpreter of a lived experience while taking reflexive bearings, exploring themes in the form of places, documents and objects, and mapping artefacts to determine the significance of home. As such, this practice is a space ballet, or dialectical dance.

Consistent with the work of Henri Lefebvre, an investigation of space, time and everyday life could be termed a rhythmanalysis. I bear witness to dwelling in an environment which includes temporal and spatial dimensions. By publishing online to invite participation, exploration of this metaphorical site - most likely a blind spot or lacuna - is already underway. In this sense, my home ≈ myself.

Background to the study

The 2019 pandemic rupture which we have come to know as SARS-CoV-2 or Covid-19 continues to disturb and confront notions of reality. Ripple effects are apparent as shocks forcing adaptive change. Two years of news headlines chronicled disturbances until the near-normal resumed, and cascading effects of policy shifts are now evident at different scales.

During the same period, awareness of climate emergency rose quickly, like an incoming tide of existential alarm. Depending on which source is accepted as most credible, we have been ignoring the warning signs which recognised climate risks for 20-40 years.

On 4 August 2022, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres was moved to tweet that “It is immoral for oil & gas companies to be making record profits from the current energy crisis…at a massive cost to the climate”. For individuals, if light appears through widening cracks in what once appeared more harmonious – life continuing as it was, as usual, or more accurately, while we were sleepwalkers, delusional and deaf – there is likely to be cognitive dissonance.

That outline of future imaginary is broken forever.

At work in 2019, I experienced news of Covid-19 as a threat to my immunocompromised husband. I was herded into meeting spaces for logistical updates, and redeployed to a different location within the same organisation until permission to work from home was granted. At this stage, Perth was effectively isolated from the rest of the nation with a closed state border. Those borders did not ease until Thursday, 3 March 2022. In Western Australia, we lived at odds with a peripheral world, observing from within the bracketed space of a two-year Covid-19 reprieve.

By drawing “on chaos theory, the self-organising features of complex adaptive systems” (Wirtz, 2021, p.5), I attempted to monitor what emerged, and chose spontaneity over any imposed order of the organisation. My decision to retire as the borders eased was an act of refusal. With a specific life course influencing the decision to enact isolation as resistance, I understood that seclusion was the best possible choice, and one that was privileged. Key to this privilege:

I have worked for 33 years to own my home;
My husband renovated three dwellings - our apartment, our first house, and tackled this last renovation over 26 years while managing kidney disease; and
Our daughters are independent adults who have made their own homes elsewhere.

Boorloo/Perth city skyline from Elizabeth Quay

Approach

Generating theory on self identity through dwelling in Western Australia depends on post qualitative research, and draws on an interpretivist approach (Carlson, Vasquez & Romero, 2023; Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; MacLure, 2020). This study seeks to cast some light within a dense and fragmented field of studies on the meaning of home by undertaking narrative inquiry (Bochner, 2014; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; Iosefo, Jones & Harris, 2021).

The relevance of this study is mediated by unpredictable social, cultural and ecological dynamics:

First, rising awareness of climate emergency, as documented most recently in the sixth IPCC Assessment Report, and the lived experience of associated existential and financial crises;
second, the struggle that is Erlebnis draws on an apt if difficult to translate German concept which Vayrynen describes as "the project of wonderful life”, perhaps more familiar as eudaimonia or #thegoodlife which cultural theorist Lauren Berlant dismisses by deploying Fredric Jameson's term "fantasy bribe" (Berlant, 2011, p.7). Philosopher Kate Soper suggests "enjoyment of affluent consumption has become compromised by its unpleasurable by-products (noise, pollution, danger, stress, health risks, excessive waste, and aesthetic impact on the environment)" (Soper, 2006, p.7). Clearly, the good life as a promissory note was fading long before SARS-CoV-2 reconfigured the social imaginary; and
third, of anticipated historical and cultural significance in the approach to the bicentenary of Western Australia’s capital city in 2029, the future-becoming seems determined to navigate chaos by enacting business as usual. This last element is crucial for what is likely to be experienced as the ebbs and flows of the housing market and economy, as well as the evolving and contestable nature of Australian identity, which includes commonly-held beliefs about belonging or feeling a sense of security in places, including a nationally bound, politicised homeland (see Schultz, 2022).

For the purpose of this study, home is defined as a spatial imaginary fabricated by "the realisation of ideas” (Douglas, 1991, p.289). Primarily, data gathering will take place using autoethnography and semi-structured interviews. Secondary conversations drawing on narratives, observations, documents and artefacts will be conducted as memory work to deploy the self “as an exemplar through which social processes and identities are constructed and contested, changed and resisted” (Marshall & Rossman, 2016, p.76).

Eight guiding questions have evolved from and inform the research:

1. When, where and why do you feel at home?

2. How is the way you choose to live reflected in your home?

3. Have these choices changed over time, or stayed consistent?

4. If your home could speak, what would it say about past and current occupants?

5. Are there threats to or contradictions in the meaning of home?

6. In what ways has Covid-19 impacted your experience of home, or the way you live your life?

7. How critical is a home to your sense of self or identity?

8. To what extent does your sense of home sustain and coexist between different places, times and scales?

Thus, the inquiry will consider description and analysis of the meaning of home. In this quest, autoethnography is both a process and a product (Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011).

Interviews will generate transcripts, and yield data to afford wondering, as distinct from coding. Observation will be documented in journals, photographs, and notes made while reviewing artefacts related to the home. Many of these objects are likely to have unconscious or underlying significance.

Living stories will be explored with an intention to feel confidence in safety, "But notice here that safety implies as well a freedom to confront the existence in yourself of your own demise" (Cottle, p.547). Incorporating narrative inquiry, in particular autoethnography as a primary process, anticipates that a quest is undertaken where “you may well find your way into some new notion of 'home'. Or out of it” (Poulos, 2016, p.3).

Capturing change as a dynamic - inclusive of old and new

Context

In their articulation of transcendental empiricism, Deleuze and Guattari urge inquirers to begin in the middle. There can be no forced linear account of framing in this study, but together we can dwell within a taken for granted domestic realm: the kitchen of our weatherboard house.

If we choose to sit at the table in the dining room, I shall fill the kettle to heat water for tea or coffee. The open plan kitchen you see me occupy once existed in this house as an enclosed back verandah leading out to a metallic patio covering a brick-paved deck. This area was ugly, or what Hurdley dismisses in her study of British domestic culture as an aesthetic monstrosity. These features are long-gone, but my memory includes experience of discomforting summer heat, and removal of these monstrous elements – a deconstruction and refashioning – is part of the change that had to be made. I am at home in this place, our house and kitchen, but that empowered sense of being in the world, feeling comfortable, secure, is contingent on construction of the place along with its evolution as something other than what it was when we signed the offer and acceptance form, and committed to doubling our mortgage.

Through the process of our living with erasure, and the risk of failure which we took, change can be seen everywhere as a leading line. Self-determination then arises from the act of making change in our contexts. For me, this place is our family home throughout all its iterations:

derelict dump

DIY fixer-upper

renovator’s delight

good bones

shit-hole

detonation site

work-in-progress

one-day-when-finished

desi resi

character cottage

Definition of terms

The following definitions will be used in this study:

Anthropocene – a controversial term denoting the human epoch "in which humankind has become a geological force", and which calls into question "the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs" (Hamilton, Bonneuil & Gemenne, 2015, p.i). According to geographer Lesley Head, "If human impact on the earth can be translated into human responsibility for the Earth, the concept may help stimulate appropriate societal responses and/or invoke appropriate planetary stewardship" (Head, 2016, p.15).

Autoethnography – Consists of three sensemaking components “or activities: the ‘auto,’ or self; the ‘ethno,’ or culture; and the ‘graphy,’ or representation/ writing story” (Adams et al, 2021, p.3). As a mode of conducting research, autoethnography draws on affect in making space for “how we grapple with experiences that generate discomfort or that do not feel right or make sense” (Adams et al, 2021, p.4).

Bricolage – "...a pieced-together set of representations that are fitted to the specifics of a complex situation" (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018, p.45).

Bricoleur – A metaphor discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss, "the self-constructor is involved in something like an interpretive salvage operation, crafting selves from the vast array of available resources, making do with what he or she has to work with in circumstances at hand, all the while constrained, but not completely controlled, by the working conditions of the moment... a practical and artful response to prevailing circumstances, an application of what is available in relation to the narrative tasks at hand" (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000, p.153).

Change – Complex, multifaceted and unpredictable. “We participate in a world where change is all there is” (Wheatley, 2007, p.84).

Chaos theory – Applies to that which is unpredictable, unstable, and cannot be controlled, yet persists as “...the self organising features of complex adaptive systems” (Wirtz, 2012, p.5).

Dasein – Heidegger's term for being-in-the-world which is taken to mean how we are as a basic premise or fact. In other words, for Heidegger it is a referential totality. Dasein's sense of Self in turn shapes being-at-home. The terms run together as hyphenated-wholes, never torn apart, so we are "always in-the-world and cannot be otherwise" (Curtis, 2013, p.46).

Dwelling – Drawing on Heidegger's notion which creates an ambiguous impression, "to dwell implies more than to inhabit, to cultivate, or to organize space. It means to live in a manner which is attuned to the rhythms of nature, to see one’s life as anchored in human history and directed toward a future, to build a home which is the everyday symbol of a dialogue with one’s ecological and social milieu" (Buttimer, 1976, p.277).

Espoused theory – Theory of action applying to a situation which would usually be communicated verbally as a sign of allegiance; often marked by contrast to theory in use (Argyris & Schon, 1974).

Essentially contested concept – Disagreements are inevitable since no lacunae exist; a clear definition of an essentially contested concept is unattainable. When different uses are examined, "we soon see that there is no one clearly definable general use of any of them which can be set up as the correct or standard use" (Gallie, 1955, p.168). According to Meers, "to argue that the lack of a unified concept of home is a problem is to misunderstand the nature of the theoretical arguments at play... there can never be such a unified front" (Meers, 2013, p.13).

Home – A spatial imaginary (Blunt & Dowling, 2022, p.7), so a fluid space rendered possible by “the realisation of ideas” (Douglas, 1991, p.289).

Mobility – Movement to achieve a "means of endlessly making prospects (or 'progress') for home-and-family that becomes, for many people, the primary activity of existence" (Morris, 1988, p.43).

Place – Something we construct (Perkins, Thorns, Winstanley & Newton, 2002, p.4). In The practice of everyday life, de Certeau distinguishes between place and space with the assertion that place "implies an indication of stability" (de Certeau,1984, p.229).

Psychogeography – Drawing on the legacy of Guy Debord and the Situationists, the term has experienced slippage from a "set of avant garde practices" to a literary movement or a political strategy, "resisting definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practitioners" (Coverley, 2010, p.10).

Reflective practice – Cyclic process of review. According to Schon, the reflective practitioner operates spontaneously in everyday life, thus attending both to actions and feedback loops which is termed knowing-in-action (Schon, 1983, p.49). Vainikka distinguishes reflexivity as a means of interpreting the individual's "role in the world" which then "allows the self an understanding of social contexts and relations that help to construct individual identities" (Vainikka, 2020, p.138).

Rhythmanalysis – A non-linear conception of time and history which balanced Henri Lefebvre's rethinking of the question of space (Lefebvre, 2004).

Self identity – A "reservoir of beliefs, understandings, and sentiments of oneself" that are the result of internalised practices and memory (Vainikka, 2020). In this sense, self is made through narratives. Within a psychological frame, the modern self "seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of its era" (Cushman, 1990, p.600).

Situated knowledges – Not only are they active instruments which produce knowledge, but "the apparatus of bodily production" (Haraway, 1988, p.595). Situated knowledges demand consideration of power relations at play in the processes of knowledge production.

Space – Something we occupy (Perkins, Thorns, Winstanley & Newton, 2002, p.4). A dynamic continuum rather than a Newtonian "three-dimensional grid with coordinates" (Buttimer, 1976, p.282). Distinct from place, space can be seen as "composed of intersections of mobile elements... actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it" (de Certeau, 1984, p.229).

Theory in use – Beliefs which “govern actual behaviour and tend to be tacit structures” (Smith, 2013, para 9).

Theory of action – “...a set of rules that individuals use to design and implement their own behavior as well as to understand the behavior of others” (Argyris, 1991, p.103).

Overview of the literature

Research indicates that home is a problematic concept, relevant to prolific studies across disciplines, and this fluidity is likely to cause confusion since meaning and experiences can appear incoherent. An additional problem arises from complexities of scale.

Where theorists address the extensive spatial upheaval accompanying processes of globalisation, the ruptures, realignment and dissolving boundaries generated by shifting capital flows are perceived as a threat to any notion of place as coherent (Easthope, 2004; Massey, 1992). Within the disorientating dynamic of time-space compression, where people cling to security, home becomes “an emotional warehouse” (Easthope, 2004, p.134). Amid such fragmentation, belonging and self-identity can be seen as increasingly important since what was unselfconsciously taken for granted is revealed as uncertain and unnerving. It is this politics of identity which Easthope draws on to include "the idea of defining oneself in opposition to an 'other'" (Easthope quoting Gillian Rose, 2004, p.130).

Bollnow’s philosophical analysis of home addresses overlooked features of the lived-space which “although it is part of a larger whole, it remains the spatial centre of the life of the individual” (Bollnow, 1961, p.33). Doors, windows and roads in this interpretation become a means of integrating the individual within possibilities of experience by enabling access to the non-private so less secure, possibly hostile, even dangerous outer-space. Walls of the home, then, are conceived as a necessary divide constructed for security and peace, but, if individuals were locked inside, he warns that the “house would soon become a prison” (Bollnow, 1961, p.34).

Critics of a dialectic between “inside” and “outside” recommend conceiving of a discursive middle ground to explore how mental geographies of the home-place are constructed, used, and inscribed with meanings which are communicated within social and political landscapes, especially as home-places “can be ridden with tension” (Reinders & Van der Land, 2008, p.5).

Drawing on architecture, design and Jungian psychology, Cooper employs intuitive speculation to suggest that the house is a flexible symbol-of-self as depicted in literature, poetry and dreams since “we project something of ourselves onto its physical fabric” (Cooper, 1974, p.131): a distinctive façade represents social status; social conditioning is apparent in the enticement of advertising which broadcasts images of an archetypal good life; and interior decoration serves as validation or expression of self-identity.

In historical accounts, the home as a place of dwelling comes to be understood from an engaging catalogue of distinct rooms, materials, and enacted social practices performed by our ancestors, recognisable as people like us although framed in other periods and cultures, from whom we may have inherited (or rejected) ways of being in the world. The historical house/home can seem fixed in space within a private sphere where domestic functions operate in a naturalised and gendered paradigm; material possessions selected for display appear to be audited or curated as indicators of amenity, curiosity, considerable expense, and in terms of relative comforts.

By paying attention to specific features, identities come to the fore. Historians capture glimmers of pride, striving and achievement through acquisition in their appraisal of such wealth as investment properties of influential or significant figures. Selective focus in these accounts evokes details which are conceived as changing over time to suit the homeowners’ tastes, yet still momentarily frozen for readers’ observation through descriptive scrutiny (Bryson, 2010; Lane, 2007; Rybczynski, 1987). Categories of roles described include merchants, families, employees and home owners while pursuits include business, innovations in architecture and technology, decoration, eating, sleeping, hygiene and – critical where social class and the effects of poverty are elaborated – survival.

In attending to the geographies of self, place and space in relation to home, landscapes considered are more metaphorical than physical. Research exposes the insiders' views with their observations of embeddedness "about how we live in and through identities, bodies, places, and spaces in non-linear, incoherent, and fragmented ways" (Schissell, 2006, p.1). Similarly, the Routledge Key Ideas in Geography series elaborates on the intertwining of the material and spatial imaginary to encompass the lived experiences of everyday lives since “home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and... geographies of home are multi-scalar” (Blunt & Dowling, 2022, p.i). This collection presents case study material as intersecting themes which open with the excitement of setting up home and end with a neat counterpart – both resolution and springboard - on leaving home.

Elsewhere in the social sciences, extensive bibliographies seek to emphasise either intersectionality – for example migration and home studies (Boccagni, Bonfanti, Miranda & Massa, 2018) - or distinctions within a specific field, such as a social scientific perspective (Perkins, Thorns, Winstanley & Newton, 2002). As mentioned, speculative investigations include:

consideration of home as a symbolic representation of the self (Cooper, 1974; Marcus, 2006), and
belongings within the home as material objects serving to construct that self through relationality (Jacobs & Malpas, 2013; Noble, 2004),
materiality (Hurdley, 2013; Miller, 2001; Radin,1982), or, alternatively,
framed by nostalgia within a space time continuum (Boym, 2007; Buttimer, 1978; Wilson, 2015).

Critical studies consider the meaning of home and possible future directions (Despres, 1991); seek to understand home as a multidimensional concept (Mallet, 2004); and map mental geographies of home in which space and place are conceived as flexible narratives, offering revelatory interpretations for analysis (Reinders & Van der Land, 2008; Woodward, 2003).

The fields of anthropology, architecture, geography, environmental psychology, history, landscape architecture, migration studies, philosophy, property law, psychology and sociology all generate theoretical approaches to the study of the meaning of home. It is through the multidisciplinary approach recommended by Somerville as an integrated theory that a path-breaking journey ahead can be illuminated: in this study, social phenomenology is adopted to explore identity, privacy and familiarity in relation to the social construction of home (Somerville, 1997).

While critiquing definitions, Meers argues that home is an essentially contested concept, represented by Lorna Fox’s equation “home=house + X” where the unknown value is fluid, and mutable across a lifespan (Meers, 2021, p.5). His analysis emphasises a positive feature of continuing to debate the term, without fear of being unsettled by any lack of a stable definition, and without having to endlessly critique such instability. It is taken as given. From this perspective, acknowledging the polysemic, confounding nature of the meaning of home as a concept presents opportunity rather than any inherent drawback.

Research plan and methodology

Despite feeling hopeful about exploration of ambiguities, there is considerable unease in tackling research which draws on a post qualitative and interpretive framework where encouragement is given to seek the unfamiliar and undo “tortured systematicity in this work” (St. Pierre, 2014, p.24). The task seems overwhelming. On balance, I prefer the naïve optimism of seeking to confirm an idea that, unless the attempt is made, will only ever be a chimera, a suspicion or feeling. While discussions about understandings of home continue, I come to see that, along with disagreement and dismissal, no-one will grant me permission to investigate further (the research is one thing, but who would I ask? My family refuse to be interviewed).

There is resonance when I encounter the work of feminist political economists Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham writing as J.K. Gibson-Graham who unfurl their "familiar slogan 'start where you are'" (Gibson-Graham, 2011, p.2) to emphasise that we are all participants in the becoming world "where everything is interconnected and learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way" (Ibid., p.4). In my notes, a folder titled search and be damned grows.

Reading confirms that the goal of post qualitative inquiry is "experimentation and the creation of the new" and, despite difficulties, aligns "with the humanities, with philosophy, history, the arts, the sciences, and literature, and not with the social sciences" (St. Pierre, 2021, p.6). I know by then I have chosen tails, the red pill: I commit to exploring.

In an interrelated understanding of time and space, thinking components together rather than separately proceeds from the middle, in the risky discomfiture of the whirlpool where Deleuze and Guattari conceive of plateaus, bodies without organs, rhizomes. This dynamic centre locates “home as the site of theory” (Visweswaran, 1994, p.111). Narrative inquiry will include memories, photographs, places and spaces which overlap, creating time shifts and dislocations, with the likelihood of learning about change.

This process is elastic, feels chaotic and looks messy. If I advance by approximations, “It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980, p.80). A key discomfort, and a lightening, arise simultaneously from the possibility of doing without data; where “the bricoleur, the craftsperson, as the ideal qualitative researcher” is not proceeding with induction or deduction but choosing instead to be “the abductive tool-user” (Brinkmann, 2014, p.722).

In a similar post representational vein, other scholars conceive of writing as a method of inquiry (Poulos, 2016; Richardson, 2000; St. Pierre, 2015). Introduced by Richardson, this concept was a departure developed to explain a “research practice through which we can investigate how we construct the world, ourselves and others” (Richardson, 2000, p.924); alternative forms of representation, and “writing as a method of data collection” could then include a range of forms such as “poetry, drama, auto ethnography, fiction, performance texts” among others (St. Pierre, 2015, p.5305).

What underpins self is a deeply-held sense of belonging, of feeling at home in the world, of having a uniquely recognisable identity. This much seems clear to the point of banality. Accepted theories of self development explain that a child’s sense of self emerges through distinctions, beginning with an ability to distinguish ourselves from other people (Mother, for instance), as well as other objects and things which exist in specific places (Proshansky et al, 1983). By constructing an analytical framework of belonging in place as a study of process rather than status, “feelings of belonging to a place and processes of Self-formation are mutually implicated” (Antonsich, 2010, p.651). Distinctions necessarily arise in defining the divide between those intimate feelings of personal attachment, rootedness or belonging at home which are “unavoidably conditioned by the working of power relations (politics of belonging)” (Antonsich, 2010, p.662).

Moving from a theoretical to a methodological dimension, capturing the language of self while it exists dynamically here at home within both a permeable identity boundary and communities of belonging is elusive and difficult. The home-place in which we are grounded is itself porous, symbolic, and mythologised, defined in the modern sense as a "phantasmagorical space in which the far away infiltrates the domestic sphere" (Reinders & Van der Land, 2008, p.4). How hard can it be to tell a life story when purpose, trajectory, and selection of events as narrative elements appear normative? Even the form itself may be too-familiar. Yet narrative begins with inscribing the first-person subjective account which is "notably unstable" (Bruner, 2004, p.694).

By outlining a familiar “strange junction” in his own late-fifties, Poulos deploys autoethnography since there is no “instruction manual for this moment”, yet the questions continue to arise, and stories are available through writing as exploration. This process of inquiry he describes as hauling (Poulos, 2016, p.89). Difficult work from the sound of that transitive verb. Heavy and emotional. Like moving house or shifting freight. I imagine borders: static Brexit-mode truck queues marshalling to Dover; burdensome forms to be filled in advance; and the soundtrack is of keening, reminiscent of the mechanised, high-pitched strain of fishing nets. A lament, then.

Hauling implies effort

and the risk of depletion ahead, so

I will attempt a space ballet, perform

a homing instead.

The practice Poulos so artfully demonstrates is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of immanence where “a sort of groping experimentation” can appear as a means of divination (MacLure, 2020, p.3). Well-suited to these times of climate emergency and pandemic, sounding “more like contagion and epidemic” in the form of occultism, a type of madness drawing on magic, witchcraft and sorcery; there is considerable appeal in affirming chance through speculating as creative intervention (Ibid).

Introduction

Given that home is a contested space, site, and concept, engaging with inherent inconsistencies will encompass meanings as divergent as a trap and a place of refuge (Foley et al, 2022). Autoethnography allows us to explore those memories of home which "also socially construct our genealogies, our identities, and our individual and social histories" (Herrmann, 2014, p.333). Like you, my concerns centre on being-in-the-world here and now - facing mortality, ageing, and living as well as possible in this ecosystem while caring for others. As for conceiving of home as an essentially contested concept, we could open with the formative experience of dwelling with progenitors, those people who "fuck you up, your mum and dad" (Larkin, 2001).

The traditional three up and three down of my childhood semi-detached was a responsibility I would come to escape, like everyone else, if only to leave one place to make my home elsewhere. My parents were also renting rather than homeowners with all the freedoms and limitations which that distinction implies. As a British migrant, I understood that lack of security and concerns about belonging in Australia shaped an emergent identity. My parents struggled in the new cultural landscape; they became settlers while buying a block of land, built a house, then bought another block closer to the Indian Ocean, and built again.

Both of their house designs in this phase were chosen from plans, and the burgeoning market seemed open to speculation as well as opportunity. The emerging suburban space then appeared empty, denuded as early land developments were of native flora and fauna, the suburbs mushroomed on Perth’s cleared northern sandhills. Ironically, many settlers planted native gardens, and this popular approach to landscaping promoted by the likes of Don Burke continued into the 1980s. Sprawl had yet to gain currency as a term, despite publication of government reports flagging spatial concerns from the 1950s (Maginn, 2018).

Along with other children, the building sites we dwelt among were available for exploratory games, imagination and adventure. To me at 12 or again at 15, touring display homes with my parents each weekend for any utopian ideal was an existential trap, and one I chose to avoid.

By the time I was 18, I had left my parents' home to live with my boyfriend, later my husband. Even as students, we could afford to rent houses in Perth’s inner city suburbs, specifically Leederville, Mount Hawthorn and North Perth for $50-$55 per week, but rising costs and gentrification pushed us out of those more desirable markets.

Much of our experience of rental houses included understanding of the competitive nature of the rental market, property issues, responsibilities of maintenance, and fulfilling inspection regimes. By 1988, we had become apartment dwellers in a brutalist Mount Lawley tower block with views of the Darling Scarp. Although the responsibility of maintenance was reduced in a smaller (one-bedroom) space with a balcony rather than any garden, plus a manager who lived on site maintained the facilities (washing lines, mail boxes, and garden beds – the grounds), there were also drawbacks attached to living in close proximity with so many others.

My impetus for departure from that place was the unexpected visit of a real estate agent who told us that we would have to relocate – the flat where we lived was for sale. When Wes suggested that we buy the apartment, I was surprised by strong feelings of resistance. Continue to dwell beneath a tap dancer, and alongside denizens who had built an empty beer can wall? What was acceptable for low-cost renters was not possible to contemplate as a potential home owner. Aspiration was primed: we became mortgagees.

The first property we indebted ourselves to was a one-bedroom ground floor apartment in Joondanna. Our second home project was a three-bedroom renovator’s delight (detonate or renovate) on 616sqm in Albany. Third, and finally, as a family of four we moved back to Perth to continue the process of homing in Bassendean.

What we achieved was to establish our sense of belonging in a weatherboard and iron cottage situated on a quarter acre block. While an ideal in terms of proximity to the Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River and character features, like the Albany house, this building was in dire need of repair. Together from 1983 until now, while studying, then working in education, raising two daughters, and returning to study, our mortgage was paid off within 25 years. In the same period, my husband underwent a kidney transplant, and sustained management of the DIY renovations along with his health.

For the critical distinction between place and space, Perkins et al “conceive of ‘space’ as something we occupy, and ‘place’ as something we construct” (Perkins, Thorns, Winstanley & Newton, 2002, p.4). As this house we now own in a SARS-CoV-2 context is remade by my immunocompromised husband, we dwell in a distinct place defined by creative labour. Privacy, familiarity, and security are important features of our home ownership (Somerville, 1997). Despite a recent experience attempting to sell and downscale to an apartment following both daughters’ departure, this private domain remains our haven.

Due to my husband's ongoing health issues, as well as my retirement, the work to transform our house into a home which began in 1996 is now on hiatus. This middle where we have begun is an interrupted or open-ended life project.

Selected references

Adams, T.E., Holman Jones, S. & Ellis, C. (2022). Handbook of Autoethnography (2nd Ed.). New York and London: Routledge.

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