Before I was born my parents and my half-brother and sister lived in a house 4 doors down from my childhood home, on the lower crevasse of Redgum Place, next to the path that cut through that jungly tadpole teeming drainage system, to Broken Head Road. My family moved all their belongings up the street in a wheelbarrow to 14 Redgum Place a few weeks before I was born.


14 Redgum Place was a castle, two stories, big backyard, steep driveway, balcony, tile floors, huge garage, lots of concrete and garden weeds and long tufts of grass, but Dad never let them get too long. I don’t know if the ornamental ginger plants were always there or whether Dad planted them, but it was one of the few plants that grew robust in the sandy soil with their frilly clusters of porcelain flower bulbs with speckles of yellow and deep pink. A sweet and spicy aroma carried itself in the wind when spring was almost over. A line of fat-trunked palm trees thrived as well. They grew fatter every year along the left side of the back garden until they started pushing up against each other like bubble writing and busting the neighbours' fence inwards. 


14 Redgum Place evolved as I did. Renovations, reparations, extensions, removals. 14 Redgum Place was in a constant state of change. Slowly at first and then all at once. I remember coming home from school most days to greet Kev, a friendly red-leather-skinned man who became part of our family over the years of renovations. He and Dad would work tirelessly, making Mum's dreamt-up architectural visions come alive. Until one day, when I was about seventeen, after months at a time of on-and-off labour; Of unplastered walls, plywood offcuts, and hanging electrical wire. I realised the house that I used to live in didn’t exist anymore, not physically anyway. 14 Redgum Place had learnt to walk, had its first day of school, undergone puberty, and was now an adult.


Despite this realisation, the original and sacred form will always exist in my imagination. I often visit. I remember a Slip’n’slide in the backyard on my 10th birthday, where Xander from across the street chipped his tooth. An old plastic sun-bleached swingset where me and the girl from down the street would pretend to be boyfriend and girlfriend, reenacting scenes from movies we’d seen. The rusty trampoline that was gifted to us by a family moving out. Redgum Place was a community and it formed bonds grounded in joy, tragedy, laughter, excitement, growth and kidhood. Bonds that will stand forever in time. 


To me, 14 Redgum Place is a place in time, remembered by the experiences and relationships that it became a vessel for. It's a portrait of domestic space that expanded beyond the walls of number 14 and sprawled onto Redgum itself, and all the houses that it enveloped each with their own stories. Swimming in neighbours' pools, mooning cars as they drove past, getting bit by bull ants, Riding rip sticks down the hill, looking for lost dogs.


The first notable house, as you drive along the S-shaped street, was Esther’s. She had a husband that I never saw. I only heard stories of him chopping off snakes heads with a shovel. However, Ester was a kind-souled old lady who would let us into her time-warped house. Australiana tea towels hung, and a cold, polished concrete garage loomed with nothing in it. No clutter in the house, a beige letter box, a plastic tablecloth that layed atop the mahogany dining table with plastic flowers in the middle. We would knock on her door, and sometimes she would give us chocolate. It was a transaction that made sense to us. I was sad to hear she was moved into an aged care home when I was older, and then of her death, which my mum read in the local newspaper. Her house, now inhabited by a ju-jitsu instructor and his son. A metal box granny flat sits in her backyard functioning as an Airbnb. It feels like a disrespect to Ester and her legacy.


Across from us was a hostile married middle-aged couple that lived in a salmon-pink house behind a perfectly manicured front lawn. Their kids had moved out before I was old enough to remember. The man loved that lawn. I could watch into almost every room of their empty two-story house. At night the top left room which was their bedroom, would be lit up in an array of colours from the flat-screen TV on their wall. It was a strange house but I couldn’t imagine living across from anyone else. 


Next door to us on the left side was Eliza and Mia and their English parents, Caroline and Simon. And Daisy, their smily American Staffy. Mia and Eliza were my closest friends growing up. They were two years apart, making me the middle child. Mum loves to show me photos of the three of us, standing in the driveway in ascending order, but my face is covered in makeup and bright red lipstick, and I'm wearing a flower-spotted dress. One day, at an age old enough to remember, Mia and Eliza told me about a new family that moved in up the street. We walked up and sheepishly knocked on the door, which was opened by Craig, the kind man with the deep, breathy laugh; Jean-Luc’s dad. Jean-Luc and his older sister Sabrina became a part of our gang, and we called ourselves The Redgum Rangers, taking inspiration from the Power Rangers, of course. I always wanted to be the Green Power Ranger.