Reaching out to the squatters from down the street laid bare their fragile existence
I’ve always made friends with my neighbours. Some have become lifelong friends. We’ve cooked each other meals, minded animals, played music together. Recently met some new, unusual neighbours.
“Hello?” I called from the temporary fence erected along the front of the old Queenslander. The building is sagging and decaying and looks as though on any day it could collapse into the river below. Sometimes when I passed it on my morning walk, I’d notice a side door open, other times closed. Then one morning I heard voices.
“Hello, squatters?” I called again, feeling foolish. Still no response. So I sucked up my fear, squeezed through a gap in the fence and walked toward the house.
I had wondered for a while whether to say hello. There have always been homeless people in Brisbane but in the last couple of years numbers have exploded. Winter this year was unusually cold. As I holed up in my warm house writing, I’d think about the people in the falling-down house. Should I take them hot food? But what if they were crackheads and tried to kill me? What if they followed me home and robbed me?
In the end I decided to give some money to the cafe around the corner then tell whoever was living there they could go and get whatever they wanted.
“Hello?” I called again as I approach the house. A voice said, “Come on in. You don’t need to be scared.”
Creeping in, I saw a woman and three men sitting on the floor, huddling under blankets. In front of them was a collection not of crack pipes or drug paraphernalia but tubes of paint.
“We’re artists,” the woman told me, as she stood and introduced herself and the others. I’ll call her Beth. “We’ve been decorating this place,” she said, and I saw the walls were covered in rainbow swirls of paint, and ragged prayer flags hung from the panelled ceiling.
In the kitchen, the corrugated iron alcove where a wood stove once sat still clung to the outside wall, empty except for some bits of rubbish. Boards bulged out from the walls, paint peeling. A sash window was hanging crookedly. Old sheets served as curtains. A piece of foam covered with a threadbare mattress protector lay on the floor.
The bathroom door had fallen in and the window opposite it had fallen out, but there was no running water anyway.
“This is my room,” said one of the men, showing me into a room off the kitchen. “It’s a bit of a mess.” There was a mattress on the floor with a thin, grubby-looking blanket. He showed me rocks he had collected along the river. He was chipping the quartz out of them to make jewellery, he said. Graffiti on his bedroom door read, “No family member left behind, we are all
one family.” “LOVE” was scrawled above this, with a peace sign for the O.
Sunlight streamed through the trees grown up wild around the house, adding a strange beauty to the decay and desolation. But there was a grey pall over the scene and the people in it; the grey of things discarded, unwashed, unwanted.
“I thought you might need some warm food and drink,” I said.
“Coffee would be wonderful,” Beth replied.
I told them they could get whatever they wanted from the cafe.
“Oh! You’re wonderful!” she said. I didn’t feel wonderful. I felt privileged to have never experienced homelessness or hunger. How terrifying, degrading, soul-destroying must it be to watch the sun going down, to see other people going to their homes, while knowing you have nowhere safe, warm and dry to live in a country as wealthy as Australia.
In Brisbane there are almost 10,000 people without a home every night and yet in the same street as the derelict Queenslander two other houses have been empty for more than a year.
The latest census report revealed there are about 1m homes sitting empty across Australia. The squatters’ house is in what is known as a demolition control precinct. According to Brisbane city council, “It’s difficult to get approval to demolish a home built before 1947, or even part of an older home, within a DCP.” The old Queenslander was built in 1900. There’s no obligation to maintain such houses, so owners can hang on to them as long as they pay the rates.
Lamb House, a grand two-storey house looking out towards the city at Kangaroo Point, stood empty for years. It was only when the owner’s unpaid rates bills reached $300,000 the council stepped in and sold it.
“Come back and paint with us some time,” Beth said before I left. “But make sure you go to the bathroom first. And bring your own cup!”
When I ran into Beth on my morning walk the next week she said police had shown up the day before and told them the owner wanted them out. They were given 24 hours to leave.
I felt rage at the injustice of kicking people out of a house the owner seemed in no hurry to restore. Later, my in-house legal adviser (husband) told me there could be problems for a property owner who knew people were living in an unsafe house.
“Where will you go?” I asked Beth.
“Dunno,” she replied. She told me she’d be OK but was worried about Ben (not his real name). “He’s from New Zealand,” she said, “so he can’t get Centrelink. And,” she added, moving closer, “he’s a bit clueless.”
I phoned some people who run what they call a “house of hospitality”. They provide meals and take in people with nowhere else to go. They told me to give Ben their number as they might have a place for him.
When I went around to the house to tell him there was no one there but it looked as though their stuff was in place. I found a scrap of paper, wrote a note with the number and put it where I thought it was most likely to be seen.
I like to think I could have made friends with the squatters but, even in the short time I knew them, I could see they had issues that I wasn’t equipped to deal with. In the couple of conversations I had with Beth, she alluded to a history of domestic violence and an assault that left her deaf in one ear.
But she also told me she was going to build a new world. She said she was a prophet, that she knew what was really happening. The “1%” were controlling the rest of us and some among them were not from Earth. It was as if we were being farmed by another species. Covid was a convenient cover and more was coming.
I liked Beth because she was strong, feisty and intelligent but I knew I could never be friends with her. There was no knowing how wild her thinking could become and how that might lead her to behave.
After I left the note for Ben, I took a last look around, trying to imagine how it would once have looked when it was a home, before walking back to my own home and closing the door.
There was a grey pall over the scene and the people in it; the grey of things discarded, unwashed, unwanted