3 hours ago
4
Near my home in Melbourne’s inner city sits a dilapidated but grand old house. In the nearly four years I’ve lived nearby, it has sat empty, falling deeper and deeper into disrepair, its garden becoming more wild, creating more and more problems for us as its neighbours.
There’s the pile-up of hard rubbish that often spills into neighbouring properties and onto the street. There are the bugs and rodents drawn to the place, which, of course, visit us as they come and go. And there are the worrying crashes, shouts and foul language you can occasionally hear from the house’s temporary inhabitants as you walk by.
Almost every time you pass, you hear people comment on the forsaken beauty and the sad state it’s in today.
The issue of empty homes has been a live topic amid the current housing crisis. We often hear there were a million homes sitting empty at the last census, although experts are divided as to whether that figure is meaningful.
The emptiness of the home near me, never knowing who or what is inside, has always frightened me. Then a few months ago, I started to notice wafts of delicious incense coming over the fence. Shortly afterwards, I heard gentle guitar music and melodious singing as I walked by.
One morning, I saw a number of young, tanned, pierced and tattooed hippies bent over in the front yard, cutting back the unruly garden. I said hello and asked if they were the owners of the lovely incense and guitar music. They confirmed they were. I said it was a relief to have some friendly people looking after the old girl.
Soon I noticed the front window of the house had been replaced. An aluminium-framed glass plate sat snugly in the window frame instead of a limp, old sheet. Days later, temporary joists were propped under the verandah to hold up the roof.
The bugs swarming around the place have disappeared, and I feel less afraid at night if I’ve forgotten to shut my front gate.
Walking past one day, I see they have managed to turn the water on and it’s spilling down the driveway. I am heartened by this because I figure it means they are more likely to stay.
The bins go out every bin night and are taken in the next morning, always before mine.
Eventually, I ask my new neighbours what they’re doing there in that big, cold, empty house. Why don’t they have nicer homes to go to? They are quick to tell me they are not in serious trouble. They may not have a lot of money, but they’re not at risk of starving.
A young Australian woman named Isaac explains their group started out as three or four travellers, and the number has grown as friends have needed a place to stay. She says some of them had issues in a share house and had to leave quickly with nowhere else to go, while others are just travelling or view it as a lifestyle choice.
She says some of the seven people living there know each other from the now-infamous squatting street in Lismore, Pine Street.
After the inundating floods of Lismore in 2022, the state government bought back flood-ravaged properties, many of which are still vacant. Squatters moved into some of them, and resisted requests to vacate. This week, the NSW premier, Chris Minns, said the squatters would soon be evicted, and the properties demolished.
Isaac says in the beginning, Pine Street’s inhabitants were mostly travellers, but now, of the 50-odd squatters, “there’s a mum with her kid and there’s an old man living there now who’d been living in his car.”
They invite me in and I’m surprised at how homely they’ve made it. They have painted murals over previous visitors’ graffiti, (some) pristine furniture (some not) fills the house, and their beds are made.
I ask where all the furniture is from and they launch into tales of scrubbing the place from top to bottom, booking a council hard rubbish collection, foraging furniture from the streets and friends, and installing locks on the doors for fear previous inhabitants (who they say left evidence of drug use) should return.
Isaac also tells me that that very morning the property owner came knocking and with some regret informed them they would have to leave. He wants to sell the house. She says he was very kind about it, especially since “a lot of times the owner will call the cops and make you move out in a day”.
I ask where they will go. Asaf, from Israel, responds: “Good question.” I ask if he would be homeless without the house, and he says he would likely be somewhere with “different types of walls, let’s say tents, but I don’t think homeless is the name of it”.
While Isaac is leaving the country, Asaf says the remaining people in the house will likely start another squat. How do they find the empty houses?
“Mostly what happens is you just walk around and you just see empty houses everywhere. A good indicator usually is if the front yard is mown or not. If it’s not, most of the time you can assume it’s empty,” Isaac says.
She says they feel so privileged to be in this house - not just that it’s available, but that they have the time and resources to fix it up and make it liveable, which she says is a huge amount of work.
No, they are not paying for the rubbish collection or, I assume, the water, or their use of the house or land. But I think about what they have done in return. They’ve taken a scary old abandoned house and turned it into a home. They’ve given us neighbours to chat to and smile at, and a lovely morning song each day. And why shouldn’t this prime location be put to use?
Of the many maligned groups in our society, squatters would be up there. They are considered criminals, possibly – to be feared, discouraged and moved along. But these squatters have brought life to a place where there was none, and I, for one, wish they could stay.
