The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 5

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

A home is more than a house.

Rogernomics is the economic rationalist theory and policy named for the Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas. Not everybody shares my view Rogernomics created a tidal wave of poverty and displacement of people who were the most vulnerable from their homes.With them went their poor neighbourhoods where the living was already straitened by low incomes and welfare payments. Reports of penury affecting the isolated and vulnerable Maori communities in the north of the North Island escalated rapidly into tragic reports of dire and deadly consequences. Health and medical practices and small stores closed their doors.

One of the greatest impacts on New Zealand was the removal of protectionism core to New Zealand’s being able to sustain its manufacturing industry that otherwise could only be destroyed

by flooding an economy with goods made in labour markets where wages were a relative pittance. Destroyed they were. The significant clothing industry that provided New Zealand considerable prestige went offshore. Economists will point to the reduction in the national debt and alternative industry growth.

The finance market was deregulated. The New Zealand dollar was floated. Australian money did not convert as a given as ours had with, untold here, more New Zealand dollars than Australian. I cannot believe when I reflect on it the percentage in my memory is real, formerly ours to pocket. Newspaper reports lauded the growth of the finance industry and its heroes who were the infamous yuppies. New Zealand was the first stock market in the world to open and, I was to later learn at first hand, did breathing an optimism not shared by sceptics.

A country is more than the sum of its economic parts.

Health care costs soared in the 80s when a user-pays principle was introduced and again the qualitative line between health and illness that includes the concept of health care and a government that is humane crumbled. I was hard hit by it. My closest neighborhood friend has told me in very recent years when I

returned to New Zealand for a visit I disappeared from her ken. I had no concept I did desperate in the ensuing struggle for an income and a living becoming sparer and sparer as inflation as well that soared in the 70s drove prices for utilities through the roof, add the sale of public sector facilities and add the impact of GST.

On the most immediate plane of my concerns, I wanted to return myself and the children to Australia. Every advisor demanded I follow through and remove us but without providing proper advice. My self confidence was critically low so I was unsure how to. My husband’s distress without a question was manifest in regard to separation. I faced as well the double standard of discrimination that the lawyer who was responsible for managing the detail of our buying the house automatically absorbed him as a client to manage the detail of the sale of the house and as well the intimate details of his separation. I telephoned the lawyer, which was one of my first renewed moves to establish dignity. He who had been such a gentleman I admired was no longer the man I had thought so very highly of when we met. He persisted in his attempt to reject me and my call. I persisted that the complexity was I faced potential dealings with his office result of the issue of the ownership and sale of the house. In an impassioned frame of mind, I assured him his excluding me from his office because he had blatantly absorbed my husband’s take on the issue of our separation as if it was a verifiable fact in law and moral fact did not change the blatant discrepancy. I had been denied equity and ease of access to that office. I blurted to him I was devastated by the way I was received on the phone and how highly I had thought of him.

That changed nothing in his demeanor. I drew a breath and provided a rapid fire and unmistakable true-heart account of the way I was living from the date of my announcing I was

separating from my hubby who I tried to live with for a period from the date of my announcing I was separating from him. The quality of life for six weeks and content of what was said to me regardless I met it with the patience of a martyr was killing me by rising degrees. That the cost of the kitchen was a factor was wrecking in its effect on me. I was to look at the hinges of the cupboard doors that they were displaced and going to fall off. Look at them. Look at them. The finish in the kitchen was abysmal. I was a joke. When his colleagues asked him how my writing was coming on, he said he cringed … cringed he repeated … in embarrassment.

I had an affair during my visit in Australia that was not the reason for the end of our marriage, but a symptom. In retrospect I cannot imagine any other outcome. The subject of it was an occasional reference of my husband’s instead focussed on reciting every evening on his return from work a litany of crimes I committed that were specious relative to the value I

invested into our lives. Nothing I had ever been or done that was successful was attributable to me, but to him. I was nothing he raged without him.

Some of the consequence of separation of our marriage arrangement was catastrophic on him I was left in no doubt. In the same period I learned as much as anybody could about the mental ill health of domestic violence. I secured insights into my own behaviour towards his compromised position with a large family of children in previous years and to my confusion were not referred to, my heart breaking as his rancor grew, I processed, increasing attempt to exercise tolerance of his distress. I internalised and thought.

I stayed far beyond my use-by date and withhold details I believe it is unlikely he has repeated in another relationship, more especially his circumstances changed. His new partner was a medical professional and advanced her qualifications becoming highly qualified. I wrote a letter to him before our separation when he traveled away for a conference and the reason he did not acknowledge it he told me was it was boring. I have no doubt an account of weeding an entire property in preparation for his return and I imagined enjoyment is boring by comparison with in future inhabiting a medical professional’s ideal world in companionship with a medical professional earning an income before having two more children.

The lawyer was quiet at the other end of the phone. He was listening and taking on board the desperate current then circumstance. I blamed nobody. I was telling the story. I arrived at the final word and broke down in a wave of exhaustion and

traumatised tears. I rarely cry until I sob. Another irony of my experience was the lawyer’s response likely saved me from what surely was imminent collapse, my life. His tone of voice was unmistakably kind and accepting of me, the human. He soothed me out of a deep font of sincerity he was sorry to learn of the family’s troubles. He thanked me for telephoning. He said quietly that if I was able to make myself a cup of tea and sit down with it, he agreed I was on sure ground I saw potential it was an issue of equity. I knew it likely he would advise my husband at least continuing managing the details of other than the sale of the house for both of us on an equal footing was a conflict of interest. I recall my husband coming home and the expression on his face. He asked had I spoken with the lawyer. I cannot recall if I admitted I had, but believed I would have simply said yes. I was thankful I had to deal with not the least further inference of recrimination he had to establish a relationship with a different lawyer’s office.

The first property I rented suitable to house 5 children was hard to find and grotesquely expensive. Electricity costs were soaring due to the removal of subsidies. The policy plan of Rogernomics was a thesis most regrettably, even as government corporations

were privatised, that trucked in all the implementations of change and the dismantling of what was a functional social welfare state.

Combine the increasing difficulties I did not foresee with the discrimination I experienced in an age no-one spoke of domestic violence least named it.

Before I left the marital property with the children the first time, the children and I went to see a medical professional who became agitated when the children and I were grouped in his surgery where I described the acute level of distress the family was suffering. As a consequence I developed a terror of medical presentation for any reason when he looked at me entirely confused and rejected my being there by the pronouncement I recognise in light of experience as shocked confusion, “What if your husband comes to see me and tells me a different story.”

I was too intimidated to pronounce the error what did it matter if my husband attended and told him a different story. Were that to eventuate, it was a medical practitioner well advised he was obliged to treat a family in a circumstance of serious breakdown with a raft of social problems including penury it had added to the woes of travail for a country in deepening crisis. The same

diversionary outcome was a later result of attending to a hospital having persuaded one of the older children she attend with me willing to describe a drug and alcohol problem. The attending practitioner’s eyes blazed as he drew his enormous frame and bulk up to judicial height over her to chastise we could not have you young people behaving like this.

I had gone in the period of separation with the children to a women’s shelter so crowded we lay across beds to sleep to fit all the women and children escaping domestic violence rising as the disease it is does in any circumstance of mental health distress, no one can tell me not exponentially in circumstances of the deepest poverty and mental deprivation. Passing a mirror I saw a skeletal frame and a woman with eyes that were so large I saw they were paralysed in a stare of fear. I had not recognised myself.

I sat down in my first ever group of women sharing their experiences as functioning barely as anything but unpaid domestics and by chance I was seated at the furthest end of a

semi-circle from where the first woman introduced herself and a sense of her despair.

Out of a direct quote from online: in 1984 20,000 women and children in New Zealand sought help from one of…34 refuges.

Each woman in the circle where I was no longer alone in 1986 told a story of living with a sense of extreme deprivation because of the poverty of her home and its cultural or religious mores or because of fatigue, social pressures, isolation. I was normalised. I was safe. Only in a much later retrospect did I recognise I felt safe for the racial diversity and that a larger number were Polynesian women who were immigrants. When it came to my turn, the facilitator announced to me by way of opening my presentation that of course, I was married to —— and I would not understand the experiences of the women who spoke before me, that for example I lived in comfort. I quietly described myself without rancor including the wind howling through the gaps in the structure of the house on the side of a hill and my isolation as a migrant woman with a large family, the hours I had worked, what I had invested and learned. That a social worker could deliver and direct such a crude assumption by way of a summary judgement at anyone who was a client they did not know but who looked as broken as I did would only defeat me still if I was not the experienced ageing woman I now am.

The effect however was I found myself painfully shy with the women on an individual basis. I was relieved for myself as equally for the children my husband’s lawyer persuaded mine

my husband would leave what was still at that difficult stage of the issue of housing the marital home so I could remove the children from the shelter and live in the house alone with them. My husband’s anxiety communicated through the lawyers was fear for the children they would be exposed to and contract any one of a multiplicity of childhood contagions that incidence of was rising in New Zealand at an alarming rate, especially the result of overcrowded housing.

The first property I rented suitable to house 5 children was hard to find and grotesquely expensive. Electricity costs were soaring due to the removal of subsidies. The policy plan of Rogernomics was a thesis most regrettably, even as government corporations were privatised, that trucked in all the implementations of change and the dismantling of what was a functional social welfare state.

The social welfare system shut down and excluded me because I had said I intended to return to live in Australia. I was refused an income as a supporting mother of five children. The Australian government at its inner city office refused me consideration citing the New Zealand Government responsible

as long as I was resident in New Zealand. My status as the wife of a professional whose place of employment had paid all the expenses of family relocation to New Zealand and it appeared on paper generous support on entry attracted to me discrimination. For many months I went by way of a lone and long bus journey into the city to stand in an unemployment cue to secure a government payment of the dole it was deemed by the New Zealand government I was allowed.

I witnessed violent and desperate scenes in the Department of Social Welfare result of people suffering blatant hunger they described in dramatic outbursts of anger. I recall myself angry and frustrated, hungry and deriding the behaviour of a counter clerk rejecting my attempt at application, telling me to come back in a following week to apply again for payment. You stood

in a queue until you were issued a number and called and processed. You were issued a cheque you took to a designated bank and cashed so nothing was convenient and you carried money you had to guard with your life. A woman whose obscure original nationality confused me she was employed in the position she was while I begged for considerations for the children like clockwork was eventually assigned to me as a case manager. Her sense of superiority frustrated me like a sword. I had to endure her as one might a blank wall until I realised her name was perfect for caricature, For the only time in my life I have I took to addressing her by the caricature, hesitating, and correcting myself before I proceeded with my repeated application.

I attended her office and asked for a Statutory Declaration form. I announced I had come to advise I did not intend to return to Australia. She snapped, “You can’t do that!” “I retorted I just had and for her to now provide me a Stat Dec.

However, I was not awarded a Supporting Mother’s payment for a very long further time. Among other experiences that were rough particularly on the children I received a letter in due course telling me that when my youngest turned 5 years of age I was obliged to find employment. I was back otherwsie on the dole.

The children emerging from the shelter and post-experience of unhappy parents had to be persuaded to go back to school. The education system was suffering increasing stress that was critical for impoverished sole parents struggling with high costs of living and children run amok who were poorly supervised. I

was struggling with behaviour I found intolerable my husband brought with him into my life from erratic time to time and a legal set of commitments that were harrowing. I found myself increasingly better educated in ways I had not foreseen and one of those was I witnessed work done by sophisticated practitioners of the law that was terrible, cunning, mediocre, good, excellent and incomparable.

I began to seek every avenue in which I could be a client of any department to observe and learn the skills of presentation and negotiation through lived experience. I sought groups and associations where I could witness family interventions. I read books on the ills that beset us. I was developing advanced knowledge of crisis management. The tertiary studies I had done had provided me opportunity to understand the lived experience of being hurled into the formalities of separation when children are involved.

I began to understand and find myself. I held considerably higher qualifications as result of education and experience than the situation I was described by. When I changed my own lawyer I had the unusual experience of seeing in one office a group of lawyers swell in size keen to try to establish between

themselves in discussion and argument I could attend their offices as a client whereas they identified my husband had been for a short while a client. I would normally be excluded. Their eventual decision they could not offer me a place provided me a growth of self worth especially witness to the sincerity of their apology and regret. That I was sought for my skills in presentation and I have no doubt dignity restored me that I was confident to direct and beg the office of the lawyers I finally settled with to agree in accordance to whatever path would effect a final financial separation as stress free and immediate as possible.

They agreed without protest I would pay for items however trivial or menial in their perception a listed expectation was, that meant tools of domestic use I had bought in opportunity shops at retail value, half a sewing machine that was second hand and years old that was valued by my husband’s lawyers at the highest potential retail value, the children’s beds that were given to us when we were first in New Zealand out of a discarded pile leaning up against the external wall of an auction room.

I slept on a blanket on a floor and became accustomed to it.

Housing was the primary issue and establishing a normalcy.

Normalcy was a struggle and I made innumerable mistakes I would not repeat. I was started on a learning curve.

I was appointed to my first full-time position in 1987 at the age of 37. Irony it was 1987 and I stepped after a few months in my first position into the high powered and stressful world of the deregulated finance industry. I found myself capable and equal to the demands of work in both high powered environments. The market was volatile and unstable where added to my responsibilities was a client base that was substantial and vulnerable. Having studied Economics at High School stood me

in stead for the study I had to accomplish next. My knowledge of human behaviour was a factor in market analysis that was confident. I was considering scheduling to sit broker exams.

We were especially a family unaccustomed to my long absences from home. I was working critically long hours. Home circumstances were chaotic. One night walking to the bus through deserted city streets I realised the children were neglected and my health was deteriorating. I volunteered the care of the two younger and small children to their father.

In the interim I fell into rent dispute with the landlord of the second rental property I moved the family too that was Local Council housing.

My subsequent experience was of a roller coaster as the finance industry bucked and bolted and crashed before the end of the year even as the daily paper I had worked for dismantled its manual methods of production and discarded staff in favour of the innovation of digital technology.

Choosing to illustrate families break down and that their circumstances unstable to begin with are circumscribed by the quality and affordability of their housing I have found the chronology out of sync in places and gaps in the story that is personal history only because there is an emotional enormity attached to the task of recreating a period of social history as lived experience.

Choosing to include insight into the end of my marriage is a result of the work of Rosie Batty, champion and advocate of the imperative we attend to domestic violence in whatever form it evidences in Australia.

In 1987 I joined the ranks of homeless.

To finish Part 4, I quote from online New Zealand History (Nga korera ipurangi o Aotearoa) out of a chapter titled ‘The 80s’ and as well some contemporary figures on housing in New Zealand.

By the end of the decade there was a net annual outflow of more than 30,000 with nearly 60% of all Kiwis moving overseas, included many young Māori, heading for Australia.

It is thought in New Zealand today there are 24,000 homeless in Auckland. In 2016 the population of Auckland was 33.4% of New Zealand’s population. Auckland is the destination of local migrants and incoming. Regards a demographic of population density, understand 70% of Auckland is rural and 90% of Aucklanders are urbanites. Population density is 1,210 people per square kilometre.

The rise of rents in particularly Auckland since 2013 where it was said in a news item recently the base rents start around $500 … and I have said of my experience in 1986 rents were astronomic … suggests the number of homeless in New Zealand must be on a dramatic rise well in excess of the statistic in 2013 (published 2017) 1 in 100 New Zealanders was homeless.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson

 

 

The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 4

by Sandshoe (Honshades)

In 1984, 15,771 persons whose last country of residence was Australia migrated to New Zealand. 14,097 persons went to Australia. Gain to New Zealand: 1,604.

In 1985, 12,537 persons resident in Australia migrated to New Zealand, 3, 234 less than in 1984. 21,964 persons went from New Zealand to Australia. Loss from New Zealand: 9,427

Statistics can be made to say and do anything they say. Tell them to bark and they roll over. I don’t think so when they are blatant..

In 1986, 22,578 more people left New Zealand and went to Australia than moved to New Zealand from Australia.

The drain of residents from New Zealand because they went to Australia was a blow-out.

I did not know those statistics in 1984, 1985 and 1986 that were the first three years I lived in New Zealand. I do know the white colonialist factor.

The elephant is in the room. I am harsh and believe me, I love this country with

passion because sometimes, we end up loving the place where we have experienced hell.

Where a predominance of migrants into a local environment are not English speaking or are a race and colour other than white, a white female migrant is overlooked by a white administration if she succumbs by virtue of the same experience to unattended ills or is subject to deprivation and abuse. A society that is breaking down isolates a migrant white woman as surely as any other.

I just yearned at community events and picnic places for our family to belong to large and boisterous groupings of Pacific Island migrants. With the emotional problems of an isolated woman who was a migrant with a large family of children and no immediate family to seek haven, of course I identified with migrants with large families.

I felt little shared identity with loose groupings of white New Zealanders at that time. I heard their accent as gutting. The national newsreader pronounced days of the

week as Mondee, Tuesdee etc. I misunderstood in face-to-face transactions the simplest words.

How long is a piece of string.

The reception party we were told to anticipate was long in the making. When it was we drove to a remote location I viewed over violent tree tops buffeted by a gale and nothing else in sight. A sign on the door of its bach warning to not steal or take our things they mean a lot to us transfixed me. I felt overwhelmed. I had never seen a sign like it on a door of housing that is a home. I looked to incoming new staff members who were like us finding their feet. I asked the wife of a recently arrived professional who had a job in his same department or building how it had come about and she replied ‘Nepotism’.

A blusterer of a huge man asked me where I was standing alone at a buffet table what it was like where I came from and I would not be used to the rain. I said thinking to please that where I am from it’s very wet so I’m used to rain, I like rain. He chortled, snorted, abrasive, “No, it’s NOT. Australia’s a dry country!”

No matter perhaps he considered himself a statistical genius and humorist. No matter his judgement how to behave towards a pleasant woman might have been affected by alcohol. The impact was crushing isolation in that space. He delivered his retort and stalked away.

In a round robin of what everybody did conducted in a circle on the brilliant green lawn, I was the one guest without professional employment outside the home. There was an awkward silence that caught me off guard and maybe it was mine.

Guests were introduced by description of what institution they worked for and the hostess was confused how to introduce me. I was relieved to see one of the identifiable good guys I had previously met. She took me under wing I rarely left from under. We were ushered by the hostess to be seated beside a picture window, which was now I realised the bach seemed to be built on an edge of a cliff top albeit that may have been illusion. I hate heights. The room spun as I sat down and refused an attempt by the husband of the hostess to force me to stand up and sit at the window to see the

beautiful view. Yes, lovely view I said from where I was and wrote a short story about it later in which I announced my hypocrisy complete.

The view was bleak and of waves as violent as the trees in the valley smashing against a point as if it the long tongue of a living beast. A violent sea was spraying into the air.

Children rolled on a section of dark green lawn that had a steep incline and my children fitted in. That could have been enough.

My thoughts instead were meshing with the complexities of racial distress experienced by one of the central characters in the novel, Light in August by William Faulkner. I read Light in August when I was at High School and Joe Christmas, an orphan was born with white skin in the Deep South of the American States, but believes he has black African forebears. He fitted nowhere as a result of his identity he imagined otherwise he had none seeking black associations that rejected his cloy and maladjusted in white association.

I witness I saw evidence of racism in spades where we lived in our suburb.

Most distressing it was common to hear young white men call out abuse directed at aging Polynesian women driving small sedans laden with produce from the markets. I knew racist Australia. My growth to understanding this new racism caused me feelings of the greatest rage and shame. I have experienced now widely the primary trait of a white male anywhere who is a bully to repeatedly round on lone women and cause harm by whatever means they can capitalise.

As devastating, white and black kids spat globules of mucous onto streets and pavements. When later the older two children began to hawk with gusto onto street

pavements out walking with friends they made who hawked too, my skin crawled.

I was suffering catastrophe is the best word.

In the day to day management of the family I was a key to provision. I knocked on neighbour’s doors to introduce myself where I saw a vegetable garden in a back yard. The supplement was necessity to a diet of rice, potatoes and as many varieties of bread that can be imagined as I was proficient at baking bread. My husband’s income status was a junior ladder rung. We had not expected it. He relied on verbal discussion. He was now promised he would advance when he had completed a year’s Diploma in the area of Community Health.

I was incredulous. I understood why he gave not a thought his level of income would not be on a higher rung.

His projected Diploma he knew nothing of previous to signing his contract of employment complemented six years of medical study, two further as an intern of which one was spent in his city’s hospital and the second in a markedly different city, a further few intensive months as a locum public hospital Registrar in a remote location and the only medical professional for miles around, one year of specialty in a public hospital to get experience with anesthetics regard to children and his intention

was to stand him in stead in remote locations, followed by a protracted Ph. D. He had been a supervisor of Masters students, an invitee to present a paper to an international conference in Edinburgh, Scotland and as well presented papers variously at conferences in Australia. As well as his Ph.D he had studies in statistics through successive units in economic statistics. His extra curricular activity included a position years long as an activist lobbying the Australian government to take a role encouraging smoking cessation. He was a locum doctor the duration of the length of his Ph. D. He had experience of day locums in their surgeries for general practitioners in need of a stand-in.

All of the foregoing has to suggest something to an administrative body before it transports a family of seven from one country to the other on the basis of a verbal discussion at a conference in Sydney when it was said there was not much time given to it.

I condemn the areas of usury by which research scientists are exploited. I understand the usury as lived experience.

I was alarmed in advance. Before we left Australia I received a letter of welcome that was an invitation to join the staff wives club. I did not identify as a feminist per se regardless my feelings of shock were immediate and I threw the letter down, murmured what sort of place is this I am going to?

In the study of the geography of health, place and space it is said: we are where we live. Emphasis for the purpose of establishing a health research plan is removed from what we eat. We eat, instead where we are. The factors considered are as examples

food transport to place, what are the food miles to place, where is our housing in the place, what sort of facilities and utilities do we have in our homes specific to place, who else is dependent on that place and how many, so on limitless including the topography of place. I would add only we are who we can be where we are.

Disconcerting that when we mooted going to New Zealand, we had options, other places to consider, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, a potential was the UK, another was to change course albeit that was not a seriously considered option. Our plans included I had, unabashed expected I was the centre of attention to further my qualifications to a level commensurate with the number of children in the family, my years, my need to make social contribution, well educated, entirely over dependence on one income, entirely over not having one.

Personal complications set in not least of which were trenchant post-traumatic stress and emotional issues that were an onslaught. My husband and I who with our family of children had suffered some of the loveliest moments when we met and shared them with three children and then five separated in circumstances that were ghoulish.

I initiated our separation in 1986 on my return from travel to Australia where I assisted my aged father to dismantle his sister’s estate. Grieving the death of my Aunt as an added burden, I felt the loss keenly. Reflecting back on her, I had resolved

in the time since moving to New Zealand to spend some dedicated time with her that as a consequence never had. I had wanted to confess myself needing her guidance in view of her 30 year career as a Classics mistress in a private girl’s college.

Her name was the same as mine and she never married. My name was everywhere as I moved in that home of her lifetime lived in Australia. She migrated to Australia with her parents and siblings after her graduation in 1922 from Aberdeen University so held in the house was almost 60 years of her history and extraordinary forethought. She had one drawer for example that was a mindful museum of the history of stockings. She left a complete record of lived experience. No-one had the least idea. I, only, knew the real value of what was lost because the contents of the house were distributed and sold and the property sold, tried to intervene but likely too meek and mild.

My husband and I sold our house on the hill in New Zealand next, the day it was opened for inspection on basis of the kitchen. We had installed a new kitchen. I designed it with the help of a tradesman and worked on it through nights, finishing and preparing surfaces for painting, painting with the tradesman the next day, keeping a roller constantly wet, switching between loading the roller and layering paint to a standard equal to the facilities and design. The parents of the young single man who bought the house asked to visit immediately to see the kitchen. He was a tradesman.

His mother announced to me with a laugh”He’s got a better kitchen that I do.”

I have seen what was my kitchen again when I travelled back to New Zealand 35 years after returning to live in Australia. The same owner, now family with grown

children, owns it. The kitchen is the same kitchen to its last detail except from in memory a new stove. I have not since seen a durable and smart kitchen like it.

The cost of the kitchen was something else. Remembering the house sold on the day it went on the market we nevertheless recovered the money we paid for the property and raised for improvements inclusive work on the laundry to make it good and waterproof.

I set about finding a rental property for myself and five children. Rents were astronomic. GST was introduced in 1986 at the rate of almost 20%.

1984 however, two years before, is crucial that marked the inception of the brutal period of reform referred to in New Zealand’s economic history as Rogernomics.

to be continued…

Christina Binning Wilson