OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES by PAUL KELLY and THE MESSENGERS. Story by Vin M.

Williamstown, Altona, Seaholme, Newport, Spotswood. 2023.

We have been looking at other people’s houses. Not like the characters – a cleaner and her child – in Paul Kelly’s 1992 song. No, not like that at all.

We have been doing the kids-have-grown-up-house-is-too-big-and-too-hard-to-maintain form of looking at other people’s houses. Online mostly; prying at the click of a button. Then Saturday morning open-for-inspections with thoughts and hopes and imaginings and calculations about selling-buying-moving.

It’s a million miles from the song, an almost-spoken-word-novella with just five verses and such a simple chorus. Three words sung four times.

It is the story of a cleaner and her child who, on Saturday mornings, work in and visit other people’s houses. It’s a story about what they make (especially the boy) of the goods and possessions of these large homes, often behind high fences. It’s a story of what they think of their employers’ lives, and of their children.

…They had to catch two buses to reach their destination
and the trip seemed to take forever unless he fell asleep along the way
When they got off at their stop they were in a bigger, brighter neighbourhood
All the houses were a long way back from the street
and some of them were hidden from view by big hedges
Looking down the street was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope
His mother guided him through this country
She knew exactly where to go
She carried in her bag a big, heavy ring full of keys
– all keys to other people’s houses…

We prepare to sell the family home. Twenty-four years there. It’s a big place – initially you almost needed a map and a compass to find your way. But unlike the houses in the song, it is worn-out and run-down. It wears its gaps and cracks and leaks like badges defying a nation’s obsession with home improvements. That, and the fact that I hardly know one end of a hammer from the other.

If the rain was heavy from the north we would line the upstairs window sills with beach towels. If the rain was heavy from the south we hoped the cracks above the piano would not creak open further.

But it was home and it was fun and any problems – general maintenance, a feud with a neighbour – were first world problems.

We make the place relatively presentable for the open-for-inspections. We do not hire cleaners and no way will we fall for that house-styling caper where books are only for display and a speck of dust is an outrage. Let the strangers – not that there were many – see how we live, not how we do not live.

Only one stranger shows real interest. So gets a good price.

Preparing to move, to empty the house, Julie books cleaners to make the best of the abode once everything is gone, to clean the dust and the dirt and the cobwebs from behind the piano, the TV, the stereo, the cupboards, the wardrobes, the crystal cabinet. From underneath beds and couches and dressing tables.

The three cleaners are from a business formed by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre here in Victoria. They arrive with their equipment in a van bearing ASRC details.

A woman. Two men. From, possibly, Myanmar, Iran, China. I am ashamed that I don’t ask them a second time for their names. Their first question is ‘Are you moving in or moving out?’.

And there, in what will very soon – a matter of days – no longer be my very comfortable home – I wonder how many questions these people have had to ask – and to answer – as they sought safety, refuge, a new home.

There, in the empty rooms that make things louder and clearer, I imagine these three people – and thousands upon thousands of others, millions – asking and answering questions in refugee camps, at border gates, on strange islands, on jetties before getting onto boats, in queues before boarding planes, in buses in the dark, in detention centres, in foreign landscapes and strange languages, in barren offices…

And now here they are. Three people smiling – perhaps doctors or teachers or engineers in their previous countries, perhaps housekeepers – cleaning other people’s houses.

Photos by Reuben Maskell

Stereo Story #739