Cool Travel /

Suburban Mayhem

Suburban Mayhem may be the name of a cult Australian movie but it is also a phenomenon that is spreading. In a financially logical but admittedly strange set up, I live in the backroom of the office that’s on my boyfriend’s ceramic pot yard in Sydney suburbia. At night I am kept awake not by the neighbours, but by the coloured fluorescent lights of the smash repairs across the main road and by the possums entertaining their friends in the roof. What’s strange about this set up? I’ve never seen or heard any of the approximately eight people living around me. Not once. Being in a temporary state of denying the bourgeois, I have taken to sitting on the cracked wooden steps of the office of an afternoon. Much like a detective in a Raymond Chandler novel, I sit listening, watching, waiting. The sounds that a blaring TV or dinner banter should make are filled by birds squawking and cars driving past. A blind is never pulled by a shadow and the garbage is always ready kerbside. It seems ironic when one considers that we move to the suburbs to be a part of the community, but we rarely participate in it directly once we get there. And as sad as this may seem, this is really the way most of us like it. We like to be on our own and to choose when and whom to make acquaintances with. The old adage of borrowing a cup of flour is as relevant these days as writing thank you cards. So I have taken to my neighbours in what is very much a return to the childlike wonder we all once had when passing a stranger’s house in the street and made up stories of who lived there. Their homes have become the faces of the community.