Development

 

The house of solid dreams has met the developer, its unmaker. I stare at the square of muddy hillside already staked out with posts and striped with tyre tracks. This had been one house of dreams we might have bought, had we not bought our own house of solid dreams down the street and around the corner. That was in the days when we explored along the Heidelberg ridge for a home, peering in real estate windows, circling the Saturday auctions with iridescent blue biro. This region of the metropolis has the longest long-term residents, on average 23 years, staying and thriving. I ponder the construction site fencing, dwell upon all the houses in all the length of the Heidelberg ridge that we may have bought instead of the one we bought and what lives we may have lived there, rather than here around the corner. Of the fact that of all the cities in the world we could have lived, their historical sweep and rainy patches, we lived in this immense Australian city, which is relatively recent as cities go, never mind Damascus; though this immenseness is already of some vintage and considerable size compared with more modern cities, demonstrably demonstrative dubious Dubai. The mind wonders, as it notices blue sky, how of all the planets in solar systems like our own, we find ourselves on Earth, as we call it, and not some other turbocharged planet in a rainbow galaxy someplace else. Earth is very much to the fore and in the line of vision, now that the house of solid dreams has been removed to a waste disposal on the outskirts of the metropolis, and the grandiose shade tree gone to a green waste place that spread branches in all directions across half of the garden, or site as we would say at this juncture. Erasure is a popular word with academics and a popular pastime with developers as they leave only vaguest outlines of solid dreams in a tabula rasa of mud. We had to agree that the house that was here was too small for our needs. We were puzzled that the builders took no advantage of the view across the valley to Gresswell and Springthorpe. This put us in the way of imagining the purchase of a modest dacha, or palace even of solid dreams and foolproof plumbing, pretensions to which are on show already along the Heidelberg ridge, but our imaginations dwelt most readily in somewhere liveable. Gazing through the construction fence it is not hard to imagine the house of solid dreams, and price tag, that developers will build on this slope of rainy slush: a house like all the others being built across the Antipodean metropolis, charcoal and beige, with an upstairs affording views of the valley, plumbing to speak of, no shade trees and probably no garden. It will be a place of solid dreams and a big mortgage, the amount of land required to live, apparently, and to avoid homelessness here on planet Earth.