Between 1988 and 1999 I lived in literally dozens of share houses in inner Sydney and Melbourne. Like many thousands of other post-high school losers, my friends and I lived nomadic existences in which we collided almost at random and formed brief alliances in these rented dwellings like so many unstable chemical compounds. Four to six months was an average stint in any of these hovels, and a move could be inspired by a ten dollar rent increase, an argument about a phone bill or the washing up, or the necessity to leave town to escape a raging dope habit. Although our relationships often approached the intensity of genuine friendships whilst we lived under the same roof, it was rare to maintain contact with an ex-housemate once the universe had reclaimed them from the locus of a shared address.

Although many share house denizens could trace a similarly fragmented trajectory around the inner suburbs of Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne (no-one I ever knew stayed in Perth or Adelaide long past their 17th birthday), the heart of my share house story pulses in a six month slice of 1990 at 36x South Dowling Street, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010.

36x was, and still is, a pus-coloured four bedroom terrace shrouded in black soot from countless passing cars and trucks, like an Antipodean negative of the same house, covered in snow in another hemisphere. Situated as it is on one of Sydney’s major arteries, I walk, drive or cycle past 36x several times a week. Once in a while, I will buy a tuna on brown from the sandwich shop a few doors up and stand outside 36x chewing, while I squint up through the branches of the tree out front, trying to discern any traces of my history there, or any evidence of the current lives which traverse this space 20 years on. The house hasn’t undergone too many changes: somebody has crudely coloured in the numbers 3, 6, x with what looks like crayons, and a brutal looking security grate has been screwed to the downstairs bedroom window where Michelle, a very sexy girl with freckles and auburn hair, gave me my first shot of ox-blood. In all the years I have passed by this place since my residency there came to an end, I have never seen anyone entering or leaving the house, witnessed any movement inside, or even heard any voices or music emerge from its interior.

There’s a French artist called Christian Boltanski who makes installations from old photos he finds at flea markets. He re-photographs every person in a group photo as a single portrait, enlarges them, frames each one and hangs them around a room, illuminated by small, naked bulbs. In The Children of Dijon, an assemblage made up of individual portraits extracted from class photographs of schoolchildren, Boltanski explains that his intention is to re-establish the individuality of those massed together in death (Boltanski is simultaneously talking about the death that we all face, as well as making references to the massacres of the Holocaust).

Politicians in wartime always say 200 or 2,000 people were killed in this battle or that city, but Boltanski says that you cannot speak of a massacre of 200 or 2,000 people. It is always the death of one and one and one and one and one. This is what the individual photos show: here is the one who loved spaghetti and the one who had red hair and the one who played the guitar.

I don’t know where most of us are these days. Some of us have done pretty well in later decades; getting off the dope, marrying, living overseas, pursuing careers in politics, science, art, academia, forgetting all about those rag-tag communities we once called home. For others the journey ended at 36x, or a similar house nearby, under the flashing red lights of the ambulance outside.

For me, every time I pass 36x South Dowling Street, I remember Ari who always popped wheelies on his motorcycle and had sparkling blue eyes and whose trust account I helped clear out by forging his mother’s signature on the withdrawal slips, and Glen who had dreadlocks and wore feathers in his hair and probably hocked my camera for dope but never admitted it, and Leonie from Airlie Beach who wanted to be a teacher and always wore a denim miniskirt and thongs, and Belinda whom I slept with on several nights but who never let me fuck her, who then hooked up with some geek called Geordie who only had sex with her on acid “as an experiment”, and Tim, the hurricane of a bass player who played in The Powder Monkeys and Bored! and who always wore the T-shirt I gave him on stage, and Sean who sang in The Freeloaders, and many others whose names I can’t recall.

Many things can transport me back to these intersections of times and places and people which will never happen again. The smell of mouldy futons, reminiscent of our damp terrace houses from Newtown to Fitzroy to New Farm, the sight of murky blue of the homemade tattoos with which we marked our arms and legs, the taste of dope at the back of my throat every time I see the orange lid of a discarded fit on the ground as I walk by.

Illustration by Ursula Dyson

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