The New Nomads
I write this on the land of the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples who traditionally occupied the Sydney coast. I pay my respects to Elders past and present.
I don’t begin this way because I have to. I open with this solemn acknowledgement because, when I think about home ownership, I experience a deep discomfort with coveting it on stolen land. We didn’t think this way ‘back in the day’. I was once a lawyer who executed conveyancing contracts without blinking. I didn’t appreciate that the transfers I engaged in occurred on land that always was and always will be Indigenous. In hindsight, I’m surprised that these facts didn’t land heavily in my gut, given my own inheritance of displacement. Thankfully, I know better now.
My parents are Palestinian migrants and they are, in many ways, typical of their generation. They immigrated 50 or so years ago to an Australia – golden and promising from a distance – that was dusting off its White Australia Policy to engineer a fresh approach to multiculturalism. My parents took work where they could find it, my father buoyed by his entrepreneurial spirit – factory work, then gardening and landscaping. My mother took up dressmaking. Like most people back then, my parents shared in the Great Australian Dream: the good life promised by a house, a family and a car.
Property ownership, if you can manage it, is still seen as a sweet deal and a sign of success. For many, it’s also a safety mechanism. Who doesn’t want a place to call home? For industry, property is a vast wonderland of opportunity. Australia has a rapidly growing population; according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we hit more than 25 million people in 2019, and this figure is projected to increase by 10 million by 2043. We have an ageing population whose needs must be accounted for, particularly given that many, if given the chance, would like to age in one place.
Despite skyrocketing property prices, we still need places to live. We also need the convenience property developers are starting to offer: retail, proximity to schools and parks, public transport and parking, parking, parking. Our rapidly expanding population means that we’re being crowded into urban areas. We are seeing more vertical living, mixed precincts and “close to public transport” properties that are shiny but small. Shoebox living. A child-free couple can take an apartment designed for a bachelor(ette) or student. They have to declutter with the move, but they tell themselves that it’s minimalism – ethical living in an age of consumer overload. Is the Great Australian Dream vanishing in light of this changing world, or simply transforming?
As we move towards a renovated future in Australia, there are those among us who are focusing their energy on a feeling rather than a possession: having a home is not always the same as owning a property. It’s not simply where you live, but how and with whom. While I understand the desire to own a property, to me a mortgage does not signify ownership. It’s a contract not yet fulfilled.
My father occasionally raises my lack of security (property) in conversation. He gets it. But he also wonders at my lack of motivation and the money my husband and I fritter away on rent. You see, my father is also in a way displaced. He grew up in a town in Palestine, all crumbling, sandy mountains and hot air; a land of olive trees, pomegranates, crisp cucumbers and plump fig trees in the summer. Connection to the land runs in our blood.
My mother is less sentimental. She is the kind of person who doesn’t love property, but is grateful to have the home she needs to run a household and shelter her family. Recently, she surprised me by expressing a discomfort with Australia’s historical legacy that mirrors my own: that people rush to snatch up property without a thought as to what lies beneath it. My mother began her life in Palestine, a place riven by conflict and, now, occupation. Increasingly, I see commonality between how we each see the world and life: transient, fleeting, and where ownership is conditional. My mother often remarks: “We leave with nothing in our hands.”
I think about the idea of ownership a lot more now than I did as a lawyer. If I were to own a property, I hope I would find a way to acknowledge the Traditional Owners, and I hope that means something in spirit, if not in a practical sense. I also think of my own transient essence: how I have never felt quite settled in this country or that one. A ‘third culture kid’, I am one of those haunted, displaced children of migrants who belongs nowhere – though many other children of migrants follow a well-trodden path, making sensible decisions that involve life in the suburbs and regular family catch-ups on Sunday.
For me, the promise of a 30-year mortgage lacks appeal. And because I belong everywhere (or perhaps could be anywhere) my concept of property is really one of ‘home’. Home is not necessarily where I am, but who I am with, and I’m not sure if that will ever change now. Even if I were to embrace a more traditional lifestyle that speaks to the Great Australian Dream, the world is rapidly forcing us to change how we live. We not only think differently about the affordability of that dream, but also whether it matches a more conscious generation: one that is faced with what feels like apocalyptic threats to our earth and its climate.
I’m a Sydney-sider, and for the last few months I have left my apartment to find ash on the ground. My lungs are heavy and I reach for an inhaler often. Bushfires have been raging far from me, and yet they are at my doorstep. We are killing our earth: the one true home we have. Maybe this is why I don’t look for stability in property. I am not a homeowner, but I am grateful for every house that has kept me sheltered, warm, nourished and safe. I am in my early 40s, child-free and married to a partner who I will, for the sake of expediency, assign the title of ‘breadwinner’ in our current circumstances. I am a full-time writer and I cannot afford a mortgage.
Like me, my husband Chris doesn’t envision property ownership when we look to the future, near or distant. He is aspirational: not a minimalist, but his ideal life, he claims, is to live out of a suitcase and travel the world. Right now, this is far from possible for either of us. While we enjoy the brief sojourns and explorations that our lifestyle allows, we have other areas of focus. There are the usual responsibilities: bills, rent, wellbeing, work, work, work. Then there’s the sudden – the transitional. In my case, I spend a couple of days a week with my ageing parents. These appointments began after my father was diagnosed with kidney failure. Since then, our meetings have grown in significance and reshaped our family dynamic. It’s not that I have become a carer to my father; rather, we are getting to know each other. As I am discovering, my parents have hidden plains that reveal who they are and – importantly – why. My parents are one of those success stories you hear about: arriving with nothing (true), working hard (very much so) and then coming good (yes). This was not a straightforward pathway, no unblemished road. It was a raw, messy Great Australian Dream. Consider then, how many people’s dreams are folded into this larger one? How this Dream must rework itself to accommodate the many personalities, beliefs and approaches that populate its sphere of influence?
Chris and I jokingly fantasise about our property wish-lists on occasion. I am like my father: brought into balance by the ocean, enlivened by its urgency and movement. Chris is easy-going, not fussy. He can sleep anywhere. But we don’t own a property – investment or household. We don’t fret about an $80,000 deposit, or which suburb we should live in. Chris and I share that restless spirit of not feeling tied to one place, or getting locked into the memory of a space. While Chris is not the child of migrants, we both treasure the places we inhabit, but they do not become us and we do not make them our own in some irreversible way. Even if we did desire to own a property, we could not afford to buy in the area we currently need to live in. With ageing parents and my father’s thrice-weekly dialysis treatments, I want to be close to them. But then, I’m not sure where we could afford to purchase in Sydney, period.
Consider the median prices of Australian homes, according to popular property website realestate.com: in 2019, Sydney was the most expensive Australian city to buy in, with a median price of $830,000 (all dwellings). Melbourne followed at $660,000, then Canberra at $595,000. Hobart offered the lowest median price at $425,000, with Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin and Perth all hitting median prices in the $400,000s.
Five years of marriage and we have moved five times, which is a costly endeavour. There’s a bond, cleaning expenses and movers to hire. A few years ago, as we lapped a year on a lease in a small but comfortable apartment in Sydney’s inner west, we received notice that the owner wished to sell the property. We lucked out this time, literally sliding our possessions across the hall to claim another, slightly larger (and therefore more expensive) apartment. A little before we reached two years on that lease, the owner decided to sell, and for a few months we had strangers trotting through our apartment on Saturday mornings. It felt invasive, but I reminded myself that the apartment never belonged to me – everything on display only told parts of our story. Both apartments sold for more than $800,000. Close to one million for an apartment that’s neither new nor soundproof.
"We are killing our earth: the one true home we have. Maybe this is why I don’t look for stability in property. I am not a homeowner, but I am grateful for every house that has kept me sheltered, warm, nourished and safe."
"Practical. This is the way of the new nomad. You could also say we’re like Australia’s political leadership – flexible. Replaceable. I think we’re fluid, too. "
In our most recent move, we didn’t even bother to put up the artwork we have collected on our travels and had beautifully framed. The temporary hooks are not always reliable – why take the risk of damaging the wall or the painting? I tell myself this is a healthy approach, particularly as property becomes a high-end accessory, a financially debilitating milestone for people who struggle to see the plains of life beyond the physical. I remind myself of what is most important, and focus on the things I can enjoy. Gratitude must reign, because although the beauty of our possessions are hidden from view, I have a place to live. I realise that sometimes it’s about survival; not necessarily because life is brutal, but because it’s fleeting. That nomadic spirit spills out and changes you, affects your spirit. You don’t hold on to things so tight. You find yourself less burdened by anchors and needs. And in the process, something is lost: some of the desires and habits that shape you. A loss of aesthetic charm because your apartment doesn’t have nail hooks for that painting you bought in the souk at Jerash in Jordan, or the small hand-painted work of the Trevi Fountain purchased from an old man in Rome.
Practical. This is the way of the new nomad. You could also say we’re like Australia’s political leadership – flexible. Replaceable. I think we’re fluid, too. This is what’s required of us now. I wonder if we really had a choice, restless spirit or not. When I was in my 20s, my ideal was vastly different. I completely intended and hoped for that Great Australian Dream, but life has simply – greatly – reshaped my expectations. Often this is the case; we are forced into new ways of being and thinking because of our environment and the changing laws of society. And sometimes the earth, ravaged and abused, screams its rage, forcing us to live in a different way.
Time will tell how the recent devastating bushfires will alter not only our perspective, but our devotion to property. Attachment to earth, and respect for it, is a more meaningful way to exist in the world. It’s time to unlearn, or at the very least reconfigure, the Great Australian Dream – to redistribute its parts and allow new narratives to unfold.