‘Mum would remind us that nothing, land especially, can ever be owned’

My partner and I have been house-hunting. Well, one-bedroom apartment-hunting (with a car spot, if we’re lucky). Lying low over the past few years has meant that we managed to save a modest deposit. When I asked a friend who knows things about finance and investments what to do with the money, they revealed that we could buy an apartment, similar to the one we live in, and the monthly repayments would be equal to what we spend on rent. It sounded much like “cheating the system” – something I’m a huge fan of.

Credit: Simon Letch

Like most people in their 30s, my partner and I had resigned ourselves to never owning a property and weren’t at all bitter about it. I grew up in public housing, and when my sisters and I expressed embarrassment about not owning a nice big home like our friends, Mum would remind us that nothing, land especially, can ever be owned. The concept was difficult to grasp as a child but, as I grew up and understood the history of Australia and realised what it meant to be a human, it all became clear.

Still, this idea that we could spend the same amount as our rent and be able to hang art on the walls without seeking approval, and to live without the threat of being asked to leave, was enticing. Cue my memory of the very officious-looking Department of Housing crew who came to tell my family, one sticky afternoon as I watched Round the Twist in my school uniform, that we had to move out of the only home I’d known because the government was developing the property.

It took me and my partner months to make the call but, eventually, we contacted a mortgage broker. On the morning of our Zoom meeting, we worried that our loose and faded T-shirts would make us appear less serious. We put smarter ones on and positioned the laptop so that our background was the only wall in our place not covered with bits and bobs that we have made or saved from hard rubbish.

The broker was a lovely man named Pete. We learnt that Pete had a wife and two kids and a suit. He radiated accomplishment, but also warmth, so that feeling I always get around people my age who have houses, businesses, kids and suits was subdued. The first thing we explained to him was that we knew nothing about anything and that we felt as if we were wasting his time because we had a slew of casual jobs between us that probably only amounted to one real job.

Pete assured us that he could likely make something work. After more calls and months of paperwork, we were pre-approved for a mortgage. We laughed hysterically when we read the email and ignored the whole thing for a while before realising that the pre-approval expired after 90 days.

The open-house process is a clinical one, especially when you’re treated as a numskull by a tired real-estate agent. I once dared ask a question about a parking permit and the agent pointed very bluntly toward the answer that was printed on a sheet of paper placed on a table that had been jammed into the bitty apartment for styling purposes. A Bluetooth speaker playing classical music (to seemingly drown out the sound of traffic) was also on the table and a scented candle, too; it had three wicks.

We found it absurd that home-buyers can make such seismic decisions based on a 10-minute inspection. There was no excitement in wondering about the mould that occurs in a windowless bathroom or having to add, realistically, at least 10 per cent to the price guides. Just the thought of the auction shoot-out was enough to shut us down entirely and it wasn’t long before we started to get creative: buy a house in the Blue Mountains; buy a bus and turn it into a house; buy a block of land and camp on it; buy a huge holiday.

On the day our pre-approval expired, I emailed our landlord for permission to drill a hole into that one blank wall to hang up an artwork. It had been resting patiently behind a door since we moved in three years earlier. We had to borrow a drill and a ladder from a friend and as I pushed the sizzling metal into the brick, another option occurred to me, one that would really mean cheating the system, cheating one of its strongest tenets, in fact – the one that keeps us apart and exhausted, tethered to the track of self-serving success: that we should come together in our communities, pool our funds, our power tools, our hearts and borrow space together. Because as Mum always said, nothing can ever be owned.

George Haddad’s debut novel, Losing Face (UQP; $30), was published in May.

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