On Home

Australian author John Birmingham on share houses, hotel rooms and the distinction between a shelter and a home.

“Home again,” I smiled. “Welcome back,” she said, her eyes returning the smile, in on the joke. Because I wasn’t home and we both knew it. I was actually standing at the front desk of a hotel, checking in again.

I was on a long book tour and this hotel, a favourite in Melbourne, was central to my itinerary. I had come and gone three times already, twice getting the same room. The barman knew my favourite drink at the end of a long day – vodka martini with a twist – and the matronly head waitress gently bullied me to eat my greens every night. It was comfortable and familiar, but it wasn’t home.

I love hotels and I’ve always imagined that you could make a home of one, as Sir Robert Menzies did at the Windsor in Melbourne, but it would require something more than a mere transaction, however graceful.

A home, even a modest home, is a place for the soul as much as it is a redoubt from brute nature. A rusty sheet of corrugated tin will keep off the rain. The double-glazed, floor-to-ceiling window-walls of your hotel suite high above the city will display the vast electric canyons below as a living artwork for your contemplation while sipping that excellent martini. Neither invites the attachments of heart and memory that are the foundations of home.

I have an unusual, but far from unique, perspective on this issue. I lived with nearly a hundred people across more than a dozen different share houses before writing the book that allowed me to escape forever the life of an urban nomad.

Some of the houses I wrote about in He Died With A

Felafel In His Hand were just that, and only that. Houses. Apartments. Whatever. Some of them I lived in for years and left with less of a sense of loss than I did leaving behind that hotel while on my book tour. Others I stayed in briefly but I still felt that strong tug of separation when it was time to move on, even though all I was moving on from was a brown couch in the living room or a beanbag on the barely enclosed front deck. They had become home because of the ties that bound me to the others who lived there. I didn’t really understand this until I lived alone.

Having banked an actual royalty cheque for Felafel, on real folding paper, I found myself in a position to live alone for the first time. I was coming off six or seven years in Sydney’s inner city, coming out of one long-term relationship and going into another, which would be a long-distance gig for the first year at least. I had another book to write. I was over the hell of other people. So I took up the lease on an apartment at Bondi Beach, a minute’s walk from the edge of the water.

I loved that apartment and the freedom it offered to live exactly as I wanted. I could surf every day, buy a great pizza just around the corner for dinner and reheat the leftovers for breakfast the next morning.

‘I got paid to sit around the bachelor pad of my dreams watching rubbish all day. It was magnificent. But it wasn’t a home.’