It’s Saturday night, and a group of us are in a house, in a circle about to have a ceremony. A herb that smells of armpit has been burnt to cleanse the energy.
Each person in the group has to share something about the house and what it has meant to them. The guy that’s been nominated to go first has only been to the house once. He’s dating a girl that used to live here and she brought him to the ceremony. It’s cruel, but also spectacular that the facilitator chose him to go first. He’s an architect - so he gives a vaguely design-y, aesthetic answer about how it’s a lovely house. And it is. The terrace opens up to an enormous light room with lots of glass and polished concrete floors that heat up when it gets cold, and it all flows out on to a beautiful tropical garden.
After the architect speaks, the circle is hushed for a moment while we all take our sip of broth from tiny ceramic goblets. Candlelight flickers. The broth is incredibly spicy and chocolatey. I wonder – am I meant to get high?
I had moved into the house that morning, subletting a room for a month.
It’s my third stint living in this house. I’m a serial subletter, with Sydney-based projects requiring me to leave my home in Victoria for months at a time.
I know what I’m going to say about the house when it’s my turn in the sharing circle. That it’s Narnia. You open a nondescript door and enter a rich, unusual and sometimes surreal world. The suburb has largely been leached of its colour after years of gentrification and investment bankers and people in athleisure and puffer vests, yet this house remains uniquely, gloriously weird. The people living here are the last bohemians in Tamarama – and probably deserve some sort of heritage listing for just continuing to exist colourfully in the beige.
Every big city neighbourhood has one or two houses like this – complete anomalies; multimillion dollar mansions, whether they be glorious crumbling piles or carefully renovated, in prime real estate, that are filled with artists, or in this case yoga teachers and people in the music industry.
This house in Tamarama is one of those places where many people have passed through. Rooms that become available tend to get filled by word of mouth. Friends pass them down to friends before they move up to Byron Bay to start their online coaching business or ayahuasca retreat or shaman traineeship.
I had to go through a lengthy interview process before I was allowed a temporary residency. The house operates in some respects like a modern-day commune. There’s a fire pit, shower and bathtub in the backyard and people can eat or cook communally if they wish. Everyone hangs out. There’s a puppy. There’s a projector for movie nights. There are parties. Sometimes people bring instruments and sit around and sing.
The house even has its own signature cocktail – a sort of organic, healthy margarita that the housemates claim to be “medicinal”.
With so much movement, this is also a house where ritual is important. Two people were leaving the house this week, and the ceremony was in order to farewell them as they transitioned to the next stage of their life (or in my case, it’s not so much transitioning into the house, as cycling back to places I’ve been before – in a sort of real estate samsara.)
Strange things happen in the house. You may come back from your straight-arse job in the city to find some women dancing naked on the grass under the moonlight, or a couple of people squashed in the bath outside, drinking wine.
Friends of mine have stayed one night and instead of small talk and breakfast in the kitchen, they’ll emerge confused and dazed on to the street after having had an early-morning conversation about the glory of the clitoris.
There’s not really any rules but no one is allowed to kill a spider or put their recycling into the wrong bin. (One night I thought my arachnophobic housemate was having the world’s most epic orgasm, such were the screams – but it turned out a sack of baby spiders burst out on to her bed that she was forbidden from killing).
Composting is encouraged. The house runs completely on solar and there’s a rainwater tank. It’s all great – but what makes it significant is that places like this are disappearing, particularly from cities like Sydney.
All around us in our street, the houses of the old working class are being sold. The air hums with jackhammers. New buildings are going up – erected right to the fence line, with no yard. We’re a block from Tamarama beach and houses a street over routinely sell for $15m. The hedge fund dudes and mega-successful tradies have been moving in for the last 10 years, as they have all around Bondi and Bronte.
For a long time now, people on low-to-medium incomes who rent are pushed out of the eastern suburbs, as landlords see property purely as an investment.
But when Covid hit, and three out of the four people in the house lost their jobs in one week, the landlord halved the rent. Suddenly not only was the vibe of the house a relic from the 90s but the rent was too.
Neighbours came over this week for drinks by the firepit and we talked about how the whole beach area had gone to the dogs. They said in the 80s and 90s no one wanted to live in Bondi because of the “sewerage”. A couple of artists and reiki masters bought their houses for sweet FA – and now they have “$500 in the bank and a $2m house”.
So gentrified have the eastern beaches become that plans were floated this week to privatise part of Bondi beach and turn it into a grim-sounding private club.
The proposal included an outline of the type of professionals they hope to attract, “with the men likely to be doctors, surgeons, bankers, investors, professional directors and business entrepreneurs”. The women who visit the beach club would “occupy a similar high-end platform”, with attendees having roles in “publishing, advertising, fashion, beauty and modelling”.
While Waverley council has clarified that it received and rejected the initial proposal, maybe there’s a service in there – ring-fencing the yuppies off from the rest of us.
Meanwhile, in Tamarama, one beach over, a thin rim of low- and medium-income earners hold on. Then there’s the Tama house – the last bohemian holdout, and in a fashion, a different sort of club.
