Page 23 - C.A.L.L. #43 - Winter 2017

The inhabitants experimented with polyamory and spent many
hours discussing “how not to be jealous” – with “zero success”,
Leanne noted.

Deidre, who lived in shared houses in Carlton in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, remembers discussing communal housing in
women’s consciousness-raising groups as way of “creating a
new way of living” where all inhabitants put equal work and
love into the shared home. “The men were supposed to agree,”
she said, “and a lot of them did.”

These communities were also crucial in fuelling a proliferation
of women’s creativity, with the rise of women’s art and film-
making collectives. Amanda remembers the very night she split
up with her first husband. She had attended a women’s
consciousness-raising group and realised that as long as she
was married to him, his artistic ambitions would be the priority.
(“If we were both working, who would bring in the cup of tea?”)
In the share-house community of Carlton and Fitzroy, she found the space and support to focus on her
own creativity.

Novelist Helen Garner famously captured this world in early works such as Monkey Grip and The
Children’s Bach. The women in Garner’s stories resisted gendered identities like “mother” or
“homemaker”, often sharing lovers and childcare in communal arrangements. As Garner’s protagonist
Janet observes in Cosmo Cosmolino, she and her peers “despised our mothers for their sacrifice”.

Still, while women found freedom in these communities, they sacrificed it too. Enormous emotional
energy was spent discussing how to share their space, lives, domestic duties, resources and sometimes
lovers. Leanne joked that her house was run “a bit like a military machine”, and remembers her envy at
the seeming simple pleasures enjoyed by suburban families she would watch at the supermarket.
Another woman, Gina, recalled the pain and jealousy she felt when sharing a home with her husband
and his lover – an arrangement that at the time felt ideologically important. “It was interesting,” she said,
“because it was a philosophical decision, whereas the gut is completely prehistoric.”

Many of my interviewees spoke fondly of the houses they lived in, and particularly the evenings, meals
and music they shared. Some eventually shacked up with partners, as the wave of communal living
experiments died down in the late 1970s.

Some, though, continued to live in alternative arrangements. One interviewee moved to Nimbin in the
1980s; one lives in a friendship arrangement with her ex-husband, who is in a gay relationship; one
founded a publishing business and communal house in North Fitzroy, which lasted throughout the
1980s and into the 1990s.

Looking to this period of history is useful at a time when many speak of increasing social isolation, and
when housing is less affordable than it has ever been. Today, the proportion of over-30s adults living in
share houses has risen. But the communal nature of these share houses is somewhat diminished.

Deidre lamented to me that young people today don’t seem to enjoy the same sense of community that
she did.

“It wasn’t this individual thing, having your own food in the fridge and having it marked … it was like a
family thing.”

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