Dream homes

This will sound like a thought experiment, or a dystopian daydream, or the plot of a sci-fi film. You walk the dog early one morning, and a house down the road has disappeared. The block where it stood has been cleared, smoothed and planted with perfect and brightly green grass. A row of bollards has been installed to divide this newly park-like space from the width of the road’s footpath, with the punctuation of one bright yellow access gate. You walk on. In another street, another house has disappeared, replaced by the same assemblage of things. You walk a little more. Another house has gone; and then another.

This is what is happening around me. In the inner-city Brisbane suburbs where I live and walk and work. In Fairfield and Yeronga. This is what is happening here now.

Let me try to describe the sounds that precede this transformation. Like truckloads of rocks being tipped out by semi-trailers. Or large crates and boxes hefted in a shopping centre car park. But that’s not what it is. It’s a steam shovel destroying a house, bashing and butting at its solidity and converting it to rubble. The tiles or the tin from the roof. The outer casing – sometimes brick, but mostly the differently splintering wrench that’s made by crunched-up weatherboard. The bashing, butting, crushing of the walls, ceilings, floors, doors that once made rooms that once made spaces that once delineated lives. All of this transformed into piles of detritus that are scooped up, dump-trucked and carried away.

Houses have been disappearing around here for a while now. Last year, in the wake of the 2021–22 floods in south-east Queensland, the state’s Reconstruction Authority offered a first round of buyback contracts to 407 property owners, 260 of which were taken up. As of mid March this year, a total of 678 offers for voluntary home buyback had been accepted by home owners.

Under this scheme, residences are vacated and demolished, and the land on which they sat returned to local councils – in my part of the world, that’s Brisbane City Council. And what Brisbane City Council has done, in the short term, is to institute a kind of holding pattern: these insta-park ordinary suburban blocks. Sometimes they’re adjacent to each other but more often they’re separated by still-extant dwellings, some sitting where they’ve always sat and some raised up high on thin poles towards the sky. Empty spaces transformed with uniform squares of turf and bright yellow access gateways, as if emergency vehicles might later require safe passageway into their emptinesses.

There’s been community consultation on what might happen in these spaces next – what kinds of plantings might be undertaken, what kinds of trees. “Generally speaking,” said the letter from my local councillor, as she requested the neighbourhood’s input, “there is ongoing funding available for trees and vegetation.” I thought about urban rewilding, about Miyawaki pocket forests – compressed forests for small spaces (as small as three square metres) that claim positive impacts on local health, reduced urban temperatures and some impacts of climate change – and about America’s Homegrown National Parks, “the largest cooperative conservation project ever conceived or attempted”, now also championed in Canada by the David Suzuki Foundation. I sent my input in.

As of mid March this year, a hundred properties have been demolished or removed in this council ward alone, almost a third of the 335 properties already demolished or removed across Brisbane City Council’s reach. Three hundred and thirty-five erasures of houses, of homes; distinct pieces of streetscape. With their grass watered to a verdant furry greenness before last summer’s unexpectedly drenching El Niño, they’re strangely beautiful and utterly unnerving. Coming into being so quickly – a house can be cleared in a matter of hours, the block levelled and the grass, punctuated by those pine posts, often laid only a few days after that – they emanate an immediate sense of permanence.

As if the houses that they held had never been there at all.

This coming and going as houses and families are located, dislocated, relocated – it conjures up the idea of a presence/absence survey. These are a kind of biological monitoring to pinpoint where species are extant and where they are not. Via this metric, in these suburbs, here are 21st century humans in metropolitan Brisbane; here are 21st century humans in metropolitan Brisbane. And here are not.

Perhaps this is important to register; that this latest change, these erasures, are a next change in population, habitation, in a landscape already changed and altered so much. This suburb is called Fairfield for a simple reason: it offered loads of rich topsoil for early colonial-settler farmers – the first, in 1857, was an arrowroot farm. And it had that luscious topsoil thanks to its proximity to Maiwar, which those colonial-settlers called the Brisbane River. This suburb’s landscape sits so close to that river’s waters that it’s occasionally in them. Maiwar: “a river with a city problem”, as Margaret Cook’s recent history of Brisbane’s floods so eloquently phrased it. (Cook, who has now updated her book to take in these latest floods, points out how much of Brisbane is built on floodplain – and what that means.) But it’s so recently that these landscapes and the lives they held were broken apart for these new houses to be built here in the first place – farmhouses in the second half of the 19th century, the first weatherboards of 20th century subdivisions, and on, and on.

Here we are. Agents of change, to put it mildly.

At night, the streetlights make this new bright green grass glow with iridescence. The dog and I stand – one sniffing the evening for possums, the other gazing at these spaces like they’re paintings, trying to read them, understand them, think into how they make me feel. Around us, the solid blocks of standing houses, lights on and lives inside. These structures we trick ourselves into thinking are permanent, safe – how quickly they can vanish. Disappear.

As if they had never been there.

Nearly 10 years ago, my son and I were caught in a bus stop during a supercell storm. (Two of the three houses that stood behind us on that stretch of road that day are now these bright green insta-parks.) Trying to write about that day, that weather, that sense of threat, precarity and change, I bugged my partner for a way to connect the narratives of an unexpected meteorological moment and the broader reaches of climate change. How, I asked him back then, could I try to join those dots, of bigger individual weather events and the reaches of climate change? I thought it sounded so small when he told me: “You can say that they’re consistent with projections.”

I hear a different magnitude in his words now: more extreme weather more often. More energy in the system. More extreme projections coming on, coming on. I hear that magnitude, too, in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes report released in February this year. “The State of Weather and Climate Extremes 2023” – a year that UNSW Professor Andy Pitman, director of the centre, noted “was unusual … [for] how intense some of these events were and how they kept pushing records”. I hear it when Pitman notes that some of these events occurred “one after the other or close to each other. These temporally and spatially compounding events had a substantial impact on our environment and were difficult for us to deal with.” I hear it as the lived truth of sci-fi maestro William Gibson’s observation that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”. Here we are.

Presence and absence. Absence and presence. The streets of this town are being transformed, yes. This is what’s happening now.

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