No Mercy As The Debt Piranhas Devoured Our Family Home
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday November 16, 1987
WE'VE just lost our family home. It was taken away from us when I could not keep up the mortgage payments, nor refinance it. (How do you find a new loan when you can't even pay the interest on the existing one?)
To leave any place that has been home is a form of bereavement; but this parting was like a violent death. No fond farewells, no time to adjust, to disengage gently, to loosen the bonds of love and slip quietly away. The pain of loss is harsh and immediate.
We loved our house, built with so much trouble and frustration 17 years ago in a green suburb near the northern beaches. Perched on a rocky outcrop, it looks commanding. During our wandering years, we dreamed of a Georgian house. This, with its sash windows, buff brickwork, white fluted columns, and balustraded veranda, was to be as close to our ideal as modern practicalities allowed.
My wife's genius for gardening transformed the barren surroundings with trees, shrubs and flowers of every colour. I built brick walls, rockeries and paths.
Inside, my wife's taste in paintings and decoration gave us that atmosphere old houses oftenhave: a secluded peacefulness, the refuge we all need from the huckstering world.
It was my fault (of course - isn't it always?) for overextending myself. To me, it all seemed inevitable. I worked as hard as I knew how and I did what I could. Aren't we exhorted to be entrepreneurs and risk-takers? No-one tells you that if anything goes wrong, the system immediately works to make the situation worse. There are no lifeboats, but plenty of piranhas.
If only financial disasters happened quickly! But the agony drags on for years, draining alljoy and energy from life. Worst of all is still having to go through all the normal motions oflife.
The constant pressure of financial worry robs you of energy and ingenuity just when they aremost needed. And without funds, you cannot use the law to stave off the inevitable, nor protect yourself from predators.
The predators soon appear. Lawyers, bailiffs, surveyors, real estate agents, auctioneers - all decent and hardworking people, but eagerly spending the money soon to be "liberated" when your home is sold over your head.
Inexorably, as I fought to find a way out, my financial position worsened. The torture machine ground on relentlessly: inspections, advertisements, "open days", all like a physical violation. Finally, the auction, and the desperate hope that the place would not sell. It did. Perhaps settlement would somehow be averted? It was not.
Surely we could not really lose our home? Lose all the love and labour devoted over the years, all the secret places, the happy associations, our life as a family - could all that be dispersed and lost to us? In a sane world there must be an alternative. The world is not sane, and there wasn't.
Hardest of all to bear was the utter shock and disbelief on my wife's face when I finally admitted I was beaten. To lose not only her home, but her beautiful garden where almost every flower was like an individual. We had been thrust into a nightmare where such things can happen. Utterly desolated, she left for the last time. I stayed to see our possessions taken away by theremovers. Even then it still seemed incredible that our whole life could be dismantled just for money.
Alone in the empty house that night, I wandered from room to room, saying goodbye to all their benign presences. Hardest of all to leave were the children's rooms. Still holding me with strong bonds of love, their kindly emanations reproached me for abandoning them. At last, the empty rooms made real the extent of my loss, and I cried bitterly for the first time in my adult life.
I was brought up when men did not display their feelings, but we know better today. Even so,I am glad no-one heard my wracking sobs, nor do I ever wish to hear another man cry as I did.
Goodbye, my home.
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© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald