Canberra's older suburbia is alive with the sound of everyday crushing and levelling. The crushers and levellers are busily crushing and removing what are usually modest, blameless little homes so as to make way for bigger, roomier, sometimes McMansiony dwellings.
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But there will be a special poignancy about some crushing and levelling soon to be done in one street in O'Connor. As reported in Monday's Canberra Times, Dr Mary Hutchison's and Maureen Cummuskey's home, found to be a Mr Fluffy building and so earmarked for extinction, is one of the fabled Tocumwal houses.
During the Second World War and at the Tocumwal air force base in New South Wales, the sleeping quarters for air force personnel were built in the form of family homes (to disguise from the enemy the fact they were dormitory-like inside). After the war and with an acute housing shortage in Canberra, about 200 of them were transported to the growing suburbs of Ainslie and O'Connor.
They are of heritage importance now and the Hutchison/Cummuskey home has become one of 19 heritage homes (but the only Tocumwal house among them) earmarked for Fluffy-precipitated demolition.
It is a matter of indescribable sadness for the two women. It is one measure of Dr Hutchison's fondness for her neighbourhood that she has been a creator of the Tocumwal Archive. The online archive is a history, with a gallery of atmospheric family album pictures and a collection of personal stories, of the Tocumwal houses and of the people who have lived in them. In our black and white picture the identical twins in their identical toy cars are the Hill boys Colin and Gordon, playing in a Tocumwal house yard at 10 Quinn Street, O'Connor in about 1952.
Most of the non-Fluffy Canberra homes being routinely crushed and levelled disappear without ceremony and without a trace. This column continues to urge that no old home should disappear without a little ceremony, religious or secular, perhaps led by a celebrant, of thanks to the disappearing home for the good work it has done and all the good memories it has helped to generate.* Now this particular Tocumwal house in O'Connor is to enjoy at least a shy form of immortality in a memorial poem that Dr Hutchison has written about it, about its place in her and Maureen Cummuskey's lives and now in their memories.
Hutchison tells us that in writing the poem she was thinking not just of this tragedy touching her and the loss of this dear home but of "a wider application" to all people ever woebegone by losing their homes because of "all sorts of circumstances, all kinds of developments".
When the crushers and levellers come let's remember
Mrs Hill wearing her gumboots to hang out the washing in the backyard swamp
The summer umbrellas on the lawn by the pool
Donna's handprint in the cement of the new garage
And Mrs Coombs' herb garden in the northern sun
Let's remember George next door watching the succession of neighbours take up projects of reform and improvement
Shaking his head over the more foolish ventures
Remember the brick cladding? He couldn't bear the poor work we made with his crowbar and came over to do it himself
When the crushers and levellers come let's remember the day Malcolm told us about the Tocumwal houses
The day we first saw this one
And how we used to come and stand in the park just to look across at the house that would soon be ours
Remember how we managed to find a buyer for the pool
And all the work to turn the space it left into a vegie garden?
We must have carted tons of sand and gravel and the black plastic kept surfacing for years
Let's remember the rosellas and the king parrots quietly feasting in the apple tree, their presence betrayed only by the brief wild sway of the branch providing best access to the next piece of fruit
And the wrens, chirping and chattering, dancing up and down on that intractable block of cement that was once an extended verandah
Remember how the fallen oleander leaves and flowers building up along the driveway drove you mad
And how we wished we could have a carport in the spot we couldn't?
When the crushers and levellers come let's remember
The glorious colour of the Forest Pansy in bloom and fall filling our view of the garden
And the abundant gifts of the fig tree
Each late summer fruiting more plumply and prolifically
Remember the deep, round, clear taste of the first fig of the season
And the last.
*In our head, as we think of a form of thank you service or ritual that might precede an old home's demolition, we begin to hear a very famous song of yesteryear, Bless This House. It might be sung at such occasions. The melody is hymn-like and reverent, and it has been recorded by everyone from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to Gladys Knight and the Pips. Of course the best version is by Gracie Fields, sung in her porcelain-shattering, wallpaper-stripping, milk-curdling (but distinctive and sincere) soprano.
It would require some rewriting of its presently God-bothering words if it is to be used in today's secular Australia, but any old wordwright could do that in about 10 minutes. Leave it with me, readers.
