Dinner parties are delicate creatures. It doesn't take much for merriment and mirth to descend into the conversational equivalent of Dante's inferno. It might be the ghoulish cries of a vegan trying to impose their culinary straightjacket upon the world. Or the seemingly innocent gurgle of a baby that has the effect of binding and gagging all adult discussion. But nothing, not even the tedium of a friend's ill-chosen partner, can send a perfectly happy dinner party into the fires of a medieval hell like the words: 'we're thinking about putting a deposit on a gorgeous house in...'
BLAH BLAH BLAH.
I can't even hear the rest. All I hear from that point on is thunderous Gregorian chant. I see faceless men in brown hooded robes nursing candles as they carry the conversation to its grave.
How many dinner parties around Australia have been murdered by discussions of real estate? How many frolicking picnics and sunshiny BBQs have turned into slasher films featuring knife-wielding amateur property speculators? Even as I write there are conversations - once lively and curious- being held captive by a monster of mythological proportions: the Great Australian Dream of Home Ownership.
If we are to liberate conversation from the chains of real estate, it is important to know our enemy. Why is it that we, a highly educated, creative and culturally eclectic nation, fall victim so easily to its lures? Is it just a serious case of Stockholm syndrome where we love our warden for locking us inside a brick-veneer prison with Miele appliances, a home theatrette and crushing debt?
Let me say firstly that it hasn't always been this way. Real estate is not, as John Howard once said, a 'timeless dream'. According to the 1911 census we were (by a slim but pleasing majority) a nation of renters. Only around 49 percent of the population owned a home, compared to around 70 percent today.
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