A week ago, my girlfriend and I decided to take acid with a friend and wander around the harbour-front suburb that I live in. It’s the perfect place to walk through with heightened senses—the houses are a mix of terraces and old sandstone mansions and the streets, which sit on a peninsula, offer picturesque water views at every turn. The wind was 22 knots, and we were swept across cliffs, down wharves, through laneways and under Moreton Bay figs with their overhanging branches and thick, climbable roots. We ended up on the most expensive street in the suburb because our curiosity took us there, and because of the wind we were the only ones walking down it, so we commented openly on the design of each mansion. When you know you can never afford to live in such houses, debating their respective qualities is the closest you can get to a sense of ownership (no one can stop you looking at and talking about a particular house; it is a public walkway after all).
As I effused over a particularly charming one, which reminded me of the house in Suddenly, Last Summer—white with a veritable jungle of ferns reaching as high as the roof and obscuring the balcony—the heads of two Irish Wolfhounds popped up over the wall surrounding it, followed by the head of an elderly man. He called out for us to “come inside, let me show you it!”
Knowing he was gay from the timbre of his voice, and inclined to take up any offer when I am ripping, I accepted the invitation immediately and the other two followed me. Inside was like a scene from Withnail and I, a house lived in for decades, where wealth was so taken for granted that it was almost decayed. The grandeur had become informal and welcoming rather than holding you at arms-length as new money does. The house was walled with mirrors and carpeted with animal skins, and he showed us his project for the day —cutting out coloured paper to decorate one of the chandeliers. He had lived there for almost 30 years with his partner, an upper-class Englishman who had died recently and left him the property. He spent most of his time in the house with the two dogs, and so listened to people who walked past and chafed at their complaints of “shabbiness” and “disarray”. To many of the other owners on the street his house was wasted potential, prime real estate that could be modernised, turned into a folly of steel and glass and hubris. Hearing me coo over the—often unrecognised—beauty of the house had made him reach out to us in a moment of appreciation.
It is a rare privilege to be let into a house like that, to see how someone who has loved and collected and moulded a space in private for so long has lived—but more than that, it is rare to be let into a moneyed house like that as a stranger. It made me think of a line in RD Blackmore’s 1869 romance novel Lorna Doone, in which the love interest, aristocratic Lorna, is trying to convince the protagonist, farmer John Ridd, that he is worthy of her in spite of their class differences; “…there is nothing between us but worldly position… worldly position means wealth, and title, and the right to be in great houses, and the pleasure of being envied”. Class is not as evident in Australia as it is in the United Kingdom, not being baked into centuries of aristocratic hierarchy in the same way, nor discernible to the same degree through accents, however there are some things that carry across and apply. I thought of going to the houses of rich friends when I was a child—the discomfort I felt there, and the casual ease with which they moved between each other’s places—and I sensed that RD Blackmore was right. Class is partially about access to these private places and, sometimes, about entitlement to and assurance of that access. And in a century in which women were relegated to the domestic sphere, not able to be out and about in public spaces in the way I can be today, how much more acute would that access, or lack thereof, have felt? For even in this century, I was touched by his trust and tour, and grateful for the glimpse behind the class curtain.
