1 month ago
17
It was 1999 and it wasn’t just the ’90s that were coming to an end. My uni friends were leaving campus life, cutting their hair and moving into the adult world of shirts and ties (yes, ties). Still sporting long hair, I had one year of uni to go, though my supervisor, despairing at my lack of progress on my final project, was doubtful I would graduate. My girlfriend, meanwhile, had broken up with me to go on exchange to Bristol. In a gesture of kindness she’d offered me the lease to the old three-bed home she’d rented opposite uni.
The house was basic and had no heating or cooling, but still seemed too nice for feral students like us with our vinyl op-shop jackets hanging in the hall, stolen street signs decorating the living room, and a front veranda filled with couches where we spent hours reading, people-watching, drinking beer and listening to music.
My lounge room was full of buckets.Credit: Robin Cowcher
Years earlier, I’d regularly sat on the side of the road in my school uniform and gazed at that same house, imagining its freedoms while waiting to be driven back to suburbia.
Now I was 21 and my name was on its lease. Finding good housemates would be easy for such a central spot, where you could roll out of bed and stumble to class without shoes on. And in the world of share houses, a three-bed was perfect – affordable, spacious, and with a strong likelihood that you’d have the whole place to yourself much of the time.
Share housing had, so far, been as liberating as I’d imagined as a schoolboy – just the right balance of passable hygiene and partying, with eclectic housemates, whether it was the skint Canadian who lived on rice and soy sauce and burnt off his Saturday morning hangovers with 10k runs, the English physical education student who absolutely never wore a shirt, or the engineer masters student who posted admonishments around the house like “Do the washing up!” or “Who ate my chicken!?” I’d embraced the idea that open-mindedness and tolerance were essential for a happy household.
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Word about the spare rooms went out among friends and I pinned A4 posters on the campus noticeboards with phone number tear-offs. I soon found Mick, an apparently clean-cut commerce student with a broad smile, and Sarah, a science student from the country who’d had enough of residential college.
Perhaps Sarah had some inkling of what was coming, but it took her less than two weeks to pull up stumps. She missed her friends at college, a room had come up, and she was gone. I couldn’t afford to cover her rent, but the good news was that through a friend of a friend, we found Will, a history student and DJ.
It started off well. Swimming in CDs, Will gifted me the new PJ Harvey album and, with his trademark positivity, embraced Mick’s habit for protein supplements and pumping iron.
It was a Tuesday when I realised it wasn’t the only habit of Mick’s he’d picked up. The bucket bong (a homemade device using a bucket, a cut-off soft drink bottle and a cone that created a powerful effect) that previously lived in Mick’s room had become a permanent feature of the living room. As had Mick’s best friend Gary, who crashed on the couch one Friday night, and never left. Our house was convenient for him while he took a gap year and he didn’t mind sleeping in our living room. The three of them were soon pulling their super strength buckets every morning for breakfast, as habitually as coffee, before going out into the world. Apart from Gary that is, who never left the couch except for daily weights sessions with Mick.
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My perfect student house descended rapidly into a hangout for bodybuilding stoners gulping down a stupefying quantity of buckets. On a Friday evening one visitor looked derisively as I held a beer, saying he couldn’t face turning out like his dad, who’d always had a drink after work.
As the water-filled buckets in the living room multiplied, and protein powders filled the kitchen, the level of paranoia rose and everyone kept a private stash of toilet paper in their rooms. You didn’t need to read He Died with a Felafel in his Hand to know how much worse share house dramas can get, but at this rate I was going to become a forever-student.
My ex returned from Bristol, and took pity on me. I took regular refuge in her closet-sized houseshare down the road, my PC, the size of a mini fridge, on her desk. We’d watch episodes of Charmed while I consumed vast quantities of coffee in an attempt to never sleep so I could finish my studies and join the real world. To the astonishment of my supervisor, I made deadline.
As for bucket house, I was left with no choice but the nuclear option – giving up that prized lease. I offered it to my housemates but none of them wanted the responsibility, so the house disbanded. My 1999 came to a close cleaning out an entire house and its years of grime, accumulated furniture and of course the buckets, in hope of getting enough bond back so I could visit Sydney to celebrate New Year’s.
There, at the foot of the Harbour Bridge, I saw in the new millennium, surrounded by a million cheerful faces as we imagined the possibilities ahead. Two weeks later I’d cut my hair and was wearing a tie.
Damien Nowicki is The Age’s deputy opinion editor.
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