Good styling is worth its weight in gold but not if you’re a renter in Sydney. Rent increases following inspections are normal, lease terminations because the owner suddenly wants to move in are not uncommon.
Once, during the pandemic, a landlord wanted to put the rent up by 200$ per week - when I balked and said everyone else was lowering rents, he issued a termination notice. When I moved out, the apartment sat empty for months until the rent dropped by 300$.
Nowadays greedy landlords are not allowed to do sneaky things like this but one caveat still remains- anyone can be terminated from their rental home if the owner decides to move in. Somehow, this has now happened to me 6 times : each time following an inspection where the feedback was : wow, the owner never knew their place could look this good.
The gallery wall - measured, levelled and hung by the guys at Well Hung, who I know by name, which tells you something - had to come down. Again. A reshuffle of art, new walls, different light diffusing through alternate shutters and curtains, slanting across balconies, terraces, rooms that meant home for a year or two or three but never more. The bubble wrap is saved in boxes from last time, because it is simply expected it will be needed again, for a new place, a new set of walls auditioning for the role of my home.
I think often about the people I met in New York with rent-controlled apartments. The ones who could spread their wings in warehouses and make them their own private Idaho of trinkets and treasures from journeys to interesting corners of the world. Thirty years of accumulation in one place. Imagine! A bookshelf that has never been dismantled. A plant that has only ever known one window. A bed that creased so deeply into the carpet that it’s a different colour underneath.
And still I cling - stubbornly, ridiculously - to a vintage glass collection large enough to require its own risk assessment, to 70s tapestries, to hundreds of knick-knacks. A travelling beaver, transporting the ingredients of home from place to place as though the location doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t, quite. What matters are the stories contained in the possessions. Feelings and memories, markers, etches on the belt of time. The amber glass jug from the market in a town whose name I’ve lost but whose energy I haven’t. Home, disassembled into fragile, colourful components, a puzzle for reassembly at the next address.
Somewhere around box forty, the packing stops being logistics and becomes archaeology. Tightly held objects quizzing me on their way into the newspaper. And then I reach the wardrobe, and it gets worse, because my clothes are the most autobiographical possessions of all. I catwalk through the bedroom, and something strange happens: I still feel like her. Tanja G. The alter ego I invented at fifteen to rule the catwalk when the anxiousness flared up - bulletproof, invulnerable, assembled to spec. The whole point of her: a titanium shell I could carry into any room, any city, any set of walls, and be instantly at home, because she was the home. Portable, weatherproof, mine, and also not me.
I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately and how she just marched on through the world. In a way, I built a transportable self decades before I understood that’s what I was doing. The glassware and the tapestries are just licensed merchandise.
The universe, it seems, keeps issuing me the same memo: find safety in yourself, not in what is outside of yourself. Stop clinging to people, places, identity. Locate a current of certainty within, not without. Very enlightened, universe. Very Eckhart Tolle of you. But I’d like to see you wrap two hundred pieces of vintage glass in butchers paper and feel nothing.
Here is what I decided: yes, the safety has to live in me, because clearly no lease in this city will hold it. But the objects aren’t the failure to learn that lesson - they’re proof of it. Every move, the address changes but the collection survives. The walls were never the home- the home is whatever keeps making it out of the boxes.
Sorry for my lack of writing cadence - past week’s eclipse brought bubble wrap working overtime, a 10 hour move and a frazzled cat to soothe.
Next week I measure the walls and celebrate morning sunlight through new plantation shutters.
You are such a gifted writer Tanja. You explain this process of ownership and objects holding stories and life so well. Thank you for your insights, wisdom and honesty. Always inspiring.