I have been “homeless” for over five years now, living in a ’96 Hiace van. That’s a 1x3 metre metal box on wheels, full of my tools, books, clothes, bed, gas stove, water drum, deep cycle battery and solar panel, food drum and cardboard box full of beans, rice, olive oil and spices; my children’s drawings from when they were little and about 300 A3 drawings done with black biro I’ve done over these homeless years.
I looked for artist workspace – Wagga, Narrandera, Bourke, Tenterfield, Wandoan – while travelling and observing and drawing.
I am now camped by a sluggish creek by a busy highway in the north of Queensland where I have lived a lot of my life. My son and first grandchild are here, living in a regional centre that was once a small town. I am now on the list with housing, having been homeless for a year and now on a rumoured four-year waiting list. It is the same here as everywhere else – high rents, scarcity of housing, speculation on land and house prices, suburbanisation as the cure, relentless difficulties for some people.
I feel lucky to have been here a year and not been moved on. Also lucky because I have spent a lot of time living in the bush – I know to bury my shit (which a lot of travellers don’t) and feel comfortable among the creatures; I know to not startle snakes. When it rains the earth turns to red mud, the leeches and mosquitoes are relentless, the road in is rutted out by 4WD adventurers and impassable so I move to a patch of old sloped-road bitumen where I won’t get bogged and the leeches don’t go – but I am exposed to fierce heat when the sun comes out.
Down south, in winter, the olive oil froze in the bottle and ice formed on the inside of the van during the night. When summer comes, even in tree shade (which can be hard to find or perilous to park under) the metal of the van becomes so hot it’s uncomfortable to touch. The best of all trees to park under is the kurrajong – I nominate the species as Australian of the Year. Here at night I have to close my van to keep the bush rats and pythons out (though there are less pythons due to the heavy traffic in this area now).
Because I am getting older or because of the convection-oven nature of the atmosphere now, the heat affects me differently. Once I liked the sauna of the wet season, now my body seems to retain the heat long after the night has started to cool down. I used to like the heat but I fear the coming summer.
I use the creek to get water to wash my dishes. I rinse them afterwards with town water because the water is suspicious – because it is slow-moving and upstream there is cow manure and fertiliser from cane farms entering the water. Nevertheless, there are platypus, water dragons and turtles living in it. People come down to put pots in to catch redclaw crayfish. I don’t know if the redclaw have always been here or if they’ve been “introduced”.
I spend most of my days reading and drawing. I don’t like driving, going into town, can’t join the library because I have no address. I sit here inhaling the fumes of the thousands of cars and trucks that use the road daily. The 21st century is so noisy – the highway never ceases moaning, roaring and grunting.
When it’s pouring rain and stinking hot it is humid hell. I would like workspace – I have a lot of craft and art skills beyond drawing in a pad with a black biro and have used them to support myself and others in my life. I talked to a bloke in the industrial estate who wanted $1,000 a week for a shed. Mate, I am no business, no corporation.
I have a lot of spare time then – I am rich in that. Now that the heat has come on, the weed in the creek has grown rank and I watch it start to choke the creek. There are three sorts of weed in the creek – one that likes to mat the shallows, a small crimson fern-like thing, and Salvinia, the most prolific, which colloquially fits into the duckweed category.
I have been pulling the Salvinia from the creek for a month now, throwing it up on the banks to the delight of the bush turkeys and scrub hens. It has not diminished. Every day there are more drifts of Salvinia floating against the banks. I know it sucks oxygen out of the water, stops sunlight from penetrating, reduces aquatic life on all scales and reduces the ability of water to cleanse itself, be alive.
One great delight for me is being surprised to go down there and see a platypus at work. Early this morning I went down to the creek to fill my plastic tubs with water. Where I usually go to dip the tubs in was full of Salvinia weed again, stained with oil and the floating carcass of a big water dragon. I moved away and further down the creek and while filling my water tubs there was the platypus, digging and sending up bubbles, surfacing and diving under again. I felt pleased – I haven’t seen you in weeks! Then I thought about the dead dragon in the water, so lifeless and creepy. Do platypuses and dragons have territorial battles? Was it just old? Did the goose attack it and kill it, or a vehicle clip it as it was sunning itself on the blood-warming bitumen? I have no idea.
As a homeless artist without workspace I am confined and silenced by the political and economic workings of the last 30 years, the squandering of resources.
Wherever I travelled the last five years I would stop at the regional gallery and ask if there was a place I could camp – a shed, a property where I could do work for the region. I imagined local and travelling artists could utilise these spaces, where art is responsive, immediate, accessible and in the act of creation; alive. This space does not exist. Artists and their visions have been thrown to the wolves.
I have been putting photocopies of my work up outside the gallery and in the streets of the small town but they are rapidly taken down – leaving the bull-riding posters and the McDonald’s flag flying alongside the Australian flag in the main street. The world seems predatory, unforgiving.
The regional gallery books a year ahead and I have no idea where I’ll be in another year. I remind myself that I am an aristocrat among the homeless for I own a van and am not carrying all I own in a swag on my shoulder.
• Michael Koren is a homeless artist, dreaming by the highway in Queensland
