On Home Fiona Scott-Norman on the things we can’t bear to throw away, and how they define us.

Nothing says ‘home’ like a spare room full of treasure, writes this Melbourne writer and comedian.

Growing up, my secret pleasure was gliding like a shadow into the spare room and rummaging through the packing boxes. No matter where my parents lived – and as restless English colonials, they down-stumped all over the shop, from Hong Kong and Kenya to a cul-de-sac in Perth – there was an abandoned room with the door kept closed, brimming with unhung paintings and untouched moving boxes waiting patiently for their moment.

“I’ll know it’s a home when the pictures are up,” Mum would say wistfully in Dad’s general direction. But Dad was more likely to pay someone than get his handyman on. The paintings stayed stacked in a corner. Next to the boxes.

Norah and Arthur, always with an eye on the next adventure, failed to finish unpacking every single time. They’d crack open a box, wrinkle their noses, abandon it while they had a nice cup of tea, maybe a cheese and onion sandwich, then start afresh with a box they knew what to do with. One containing the whisky tumblers, for example, or the John le Carré novels, or the hi-fi.

Within two months the purported ‘office’ or ‘study’ or ‘guestroom’ would be suffocating in clutter, a critical mass of all the ‘we’ll get to it laters’. The packing cases were joined by dresses with broken zips, a wobbly chair, piles of papers, packets of photographs, unanswered letters, aspirational knitting, unwanted gifts, bits that had lost their bobs. To open the door with the intention to make a dent was to inhale sharply and retreat, defeated. Never seen by visitors, it was the Room Of Shame.

But to be fair, what do you do with the moth-eaten crocodile puppet from Dad’s Punch and Judy days? Or Nanna’s tiny cream leather gloves, the ones she wore when she sang opera at Covent Garden? Or Mum’s inherited fox-fur stole, smelling of dead animal and camphor, complete with head and tail? The boxes exerted too much gravity to deal with, the contents weighed down by nostalgia, superannuated status symbols and history. What can you do with memories and unfinished business? My parents helplessly rolled it like a ball of dung, from house to house.

For me, though, the junk room was the anchor. No matter where they moved, it was always there, hidden in plain sight. Full of treasure. I loved it. I was an only child in an era where, if you disappeared for hours, no-one noticed or cared. In the spare room, with its dead air and drawn curtains, I’d lose myself entirely to snooping and dress-ups.

Ooh, what’s this? Dad’s crisp letterhead work stationery from 20 years, three continents and eight addresses ago. The business half of an illicit copper gin still. A 1950s purple and grey floral frock that Mum started sewing in Dar es Salaam, held together with rusty pins and white tacking cotton. A Swahili vocab book and French language cassettes. A masonic apron. Pop’s medals. Grandad’s medals. Dad’s medals. A black bat-winged muu-muu with emerald and pearl paste stones. Steel magician’s rings.

In the spare room, with its dead air and drawn curtains, I’d lose myself entirely to snooping and dress-ups.

A skanky Santa beard and ancient glue. A signed 1937 photograph of the Duke of Windsor. Two saris. The blueprints for a boat. Mouldy army binoculars. No wonder I grew to love op shops and garage sales. They whisper the same language: treasure.

Mum and Dad’s final move was to a retirement village in Toowoomba. This was it. I flew up specifically to hang their paintings, throw out the packing boxes, clear out the ‘study’. I was on a mission to make it their home. I found a place for every damn thing. And wall space for the two Spitfire air battles painted by an ex-RAF pilot, for the Chinese girl with a mandolin looking out to sea, the 1860s portrait of a Grenadier Guard, for my Canadian Aunt Betty’s watercolours, for the English oil paintings of Muscovy ducks – all of them. It was epic. After a lifetime, Norah and Arthur were unpacked. The paintings were up. They were home. “Lovely,” Mum said, although I know she would have preferred to keep moving.

It’s a paradox, of course. To us Scott-Normans, with our reluctance to take root, a house is no home without a secret room. I have one myself. The boxes that don’t contain my life, and my housemate’s, are filled with what’s left of Mum and Dad, and unpacking them is beyond me. Dad’s cookbooks and handwritten sausage recipes. Clippings of newspaper reports on collapsed buildings he saved people from. Mum’s stiff silver frock from their 25th wedding anniversary. A Royal Doulton tea service. A couple of paintings. You know, treasures.

Last week I turned to my honey, Greg, whose man cave is just off the back room and jammed with oscilloscopes, bits of Commodore 64s bought from eBay, three screens, wires and tools, amps and a double bass, and boxes of his dad’s stuff since Ray had that terrible stroke. “Greg,” I said, “Won’t it be wonderful when we buy somewhere? To have the space to put everything?” He agreed. “Our own home? Yes.”

And then we closed the door on the back room, because it is a fresh hell of clutter.