Six months ago I moved from the city to the outer suburbs and I’m yet to meet either of my next-door neighbours. On the day we arrived, a couple across the street said hello but it turns out they are the exception to the rule. People on my street tend to keep to themselves.
My last place was on a main road in Melbourne’s inner north. From my bedroom window I was eye level with the passengers of the 508 bus. My kitchen window was almost directly opposite my neighbour’s. I had a direct line of vision into people’s lives, and it gave me a sense of comfort.
Like many who endured Melbourne’s extensive lockdowns, my family and I escaped the inner city in search of more space and less contaminated air. Now in the leafy hills of the Dandenong Ranges, I open my blinds onto dense, verdant ferns. There is silence everywhere, interspersed with the prehistoric screech of cockatoos.
I miss people. I miss listening to their arguments and the smell of their cooking. I miss treeless front yards and how close windows were to the street. I miss catching a glimpse of someone being completely themselves, like the girl I saw chatting on the phone while dangling her legs from the upstairs window. I miss the way everybody left the blinds open, resigned to a semi-public daily existence.
In the hills of Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges, deep-set houses and towering eucalyptus trees offer a lot of privacy, which for a stickybeak like me is a disaster. Luckily, soon after we moved in there was a rubbish collection and the streets became piled with discarded household items. On evening walks I sifted freely through my new neighbours’ intimate archives.
I came across a kids-sized chest of drawers, “Patrick. Private. Keep out” carved clearly on the top one. “Keepout Jacob” was etched less confidently into the drawer below, next to a Blinky Bill sticker half torn away. I was struck by the moment siblings turn away from each other; the way one decides and the other is dragged along. Leaning against the drawers were two framed paintings signed by “Susan”. One was of a candle aflame against a black velvet curtain. The other was an anchor plunging into cloudy green water. Susan had to be their mother, and her sudden departure the root cause of her sons’ bitter feud.
Past a splintered barbecue, a wet magazine collection and a discoloured floral crockery set there was a small wooden chair. It looked chainsawed out of a solid log. I inspected some white, cottony balls that had collected underneath it.
“I’d be careful with that,” a rummager opposite me said. “Those look like redback eggs.” I replaced the chair in a way that appeared casual and picked up a DVD entitled “Tim and Donna’s Wedding”.
“How great is this stuff,” I said.
“It’s a good pile,” the person agreed, filling a bag with electrical cables. “Lotta cord.”
A street over, there was a milk crate containing an old soccer ball and a framed photograph of a deeply tanned blonde woman with, I assumed, her adult son. They are sitting at an outside table of a bar and the son is laughing, self-conscious, looking slightly past his mother. She is gazing at him directly, her hand hovering above his forearm, her long red fingernails seemingly reaching for him and forever disappointed.
There were exercise bikes and a lamp shade fringed with auburn tassels, a child’s scooter with pink love hearts stretched to the tallest adjustment, a rusted teal suitcase packed and unpacked across the decades. In the yard an old woman crouched over a bed of winter roses. I wondered if the luggage was hers and whether it landed her in a place she wanted to be.
There’s a skink living in our bathroom and I’ve found millipedes curled in our bedsheets on more than one occasion. Apart from eventually being carried off by insects, I don’t know what’s in store for me in the hills. I’ve strung fairy lights along the balcony railing. When they’re on at night it feels like I’m on a ship floating on a black sea.
I don’t have a community here yet. I’m attempting to build one by picking through my neighbours’ rubbish.
Recently a man knocked on our door with a box of avocados. He’d bought too many at the market and insisted I take an armful. I thanked him and we introduced ourselves. That night I made guacamole and ate it alone on the floating balcony. It was a start.
Ashe Davenport is a writer and author
