Anson Cameron
Sometimes I live alone in a street of empty houses. Like a wintering tree, the town’s sap slows around March, and its folk fall away like foliage towards Melbourne. The houses shut down, the baker sleeps late, the Chilean checkout chick becomes chatty with the few ancients who remain. The town lies as dormant as a wisteria enduring July.
In my street of 30 houses, only two might be occupied. Kangaroos ratchet slowly through the overgrown yards cropping grass, and inside the empty houses the air ripens with the musk of desertion while obsolescence fondles the whitegoods. I can hear a neighbour’s dog bark three streets away. A symphony of new noises plays when you’re living alone – structural stresses, dripping gutters, the attritional tics and tocks that will need a tradie, new birds trilling, the sea obstinately slapping the beach, a car slowing outside, a Harley gunning out of a corner a mile away. The easterly wind plays my old house like a pan flute when it’s just me.
Living by myself, I can watch whichever TV shows I want. The telly is mine – which makes me lord and master of an unruly dullard. I eat dinner from the barbecue, which is a thrill for the first night or so, until the ease of muesli overwhelms the preparatory complexities of a cutlet. Props to those people who cook for themselves night after night – they have standards beyond mine. I eat crap and watch crap. This is called “letting yourself go”, and can only be properly done while living alone.
If I was inclined to, I could walk around the house nude, without even a sock to mar my eruption of atavism. But I’m not inclined to. Knowing the freedom of nudity is available when required is enough freedom, and nudity, for me. It’s there if I need it, in a bohemian moment, on a warm day.
When living alone, internal conversations fill the silence and all your ideas start to grow towards the sun of your own prejudice. You become increasingly yourself – always regrettable. Your brilliant little thoughts, rather than becoming strengthened by being crossbred with the intellectual DNA of another mind, breed incestuously with your other brilliant little thoughts, until your mindset resembles a medieval village where each idiotic idea is the inbred relative of another.
If ever I hear someone say, “Anson’s such a character,” or words to that effect, I know I’ve been on my own too long. Lacking Sarah’s intellectual counterweight, I’ve become just another lonely crank emerged from tracky-dacked exile with curdled opinions to hand out like a religious nut handing out glossy flyers at a tram stop.
My mum lived alone up a mountain valley for many years. She got on cheerfully enough, employing a succession of bewigged German composers and one-woman dogs to gatekeep her loneliness. Not even God is as omniscient as a recluse’s dog – they understand and forgive all. Before she holed up in the high country I hadn’t realised society, all its most sophisticated and adored people – friends, lovers, cousins, siblings, sons, daughters, neighbours, antagonists, Beefeaters, barristers, butchers – might be traded for mid-career Mahler and a prancing bitzer. But apparently it can.
Australia’s last census revealed a quarter of all households have a lone resident. Let’s say the other households average four residents, that means about 8 per cent, or nearly one in 10 of us, are living alone. An astounding figure, and a massive societal shift.
Only a couple of generations ago we were crammed cheek-by-jowl into cottages, kids four to a room and sleeping behind canvas on verandahs, with a couple of feuding grannies out the back. Migrants gathered the most far-fetched “family” under their roofs. I had Italian mates who couldn’t tell you how the old bloke smouldering away in the front room got there, nor who he really was.
Living alone is new societal development borne of affluence, mobility, longevity … and the shrinkage from what a family once was to what it is now. You’re thought eccentric if you have an ageing parent under your roof these days. And totally whacko if you’ve an aunt skulking in the bungalow.
They live alone now, those folk. But as I saw with my mother, the mind, like the hermit crab, reshapes easily to fit new domesticity. So they’re not necessarily lonely.
The American writer John O’Hara once finished a story, “why must we make such a thing of loneliness when it is the final condition of us all? And where would love be without it?”
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
