A house, a family, a home.

SINCE arriving in Canberra I have been staying at the house of the Radclyffe family, in Ainslie, just a short ride from the city centre and from the university. The deal was hooked up for me by my friend Sarah, because she is wonderful. The house's residents currently number six. There is a dog named Lucy. There is a cat named P.C. There is a guy named Ed and his girlfriend named Kat. And there is Jane, the mother, a warm faced woman of about 60, who teaches English to refugees and migrants, mostly kids and women from Sudan and Sierra Leone. She also sometimes teaches French and Japanese. And there is Ted, her husband, a small man with a tight face and white hair and a blurred tattoo on his inner arm. Ted used to be a public servant, now works as a contractor, something to do with passports. All this info I was given by Sarah on a special piece of paper before I left Perth, a short introduction to the family. They, and their house, are some of the very best things about my short time in Canberra thus far.

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ON the front verge there is a vintage car, a light pink Dodge with two surfboards strapped to the roof, and there is a beautifully restored silver and blue full-length antique bus. In the driveway; two more buses, one massive green and cream double-decker which looks like it belongs in some 1930s Superhero comic, the other smaller, blue and red and decorated with Trailer Park Trash stickers and an exhaust-burnt dolls head on the tow-ball. This bus has been converted into a living space and is therefore the mobile residence of Kat, she who is the girlfriend of Ed (the son), has piercings in both nostrils and is from Tasmania. Ed is a musician and this week Kat and he have been in Melbourne while he was being filmed on some new show called "Australia's Got Talent!" so I haven't really spent much time with them yet. Also in the yard is a motorbike that Ted rides to work, another restored Dodge with bench seats and some tiki figurines on the dash, a noseless mini minor which has been converted into a trailer, an old engine or two, and a fair amount of junk. Also: there is a vegetable garden, there is a murky pond rimmed with stones, there is a hills hoist, there is a plastic hose transporting run-off from the washing machine into the garden, there are two wooden hives, flecked with swirling bees.

I am currently bedded in the granny flat, which is out back of the house as well. The flat is joined to the garage and a shed, which until late last year was the space in which Ted was constructing a small aeroplane from a kit he got from the United States. It took him seven years to build it, but its finished now, and hes been travelling two hours each way once a week to fly it around a bit ("It looks pretty unique up there on the tarmac" he tells me, "all those other planes are nothing but caravans with wings, all painted perfect white with stripes. Mine might not be like theirs, its all hand-painted, red and silver, but thats the effect I was going for, and it's the way I like it".) This weekend he is flying it to the coastal town where he and Jane have a holiday house so that in the future he can stay longer on the coast, and just fly back to Canberra for work. "At least once" he says. "I just want to do that at least once, y'know, to say I've done it".

Inside the granny flat there is a small fridge, a tv, a microwave, two burners and a bathroom which has a floorspace measuring about 1m x 2.5m, including the shower. There is also a Telstra rented telephone, as well as an old black telephone without any dial on it, just a silver crank you would use to contact the operator in order to place a call. I thought this was a showpiece only, until it rang with two short bursts the other night. I didn't answer, thinking it must have been hooked up to the main line inside the house, but a few minutes later Ted came knocking on the door. "Dincha hear the phone?" he asked "I was tryin ta ask you if you wanted to come in for some dinner, or a beer". Apparently inside the house there is another vintage phone, hooked up as a direct line through to the one sitting plump on my bedside table. An old-world intercom.

Inside, Ted tells me how he brews his own beer, in order to save money on Reeche's, which is otherwise the only beer he'll drink. He tells me his plans to go to the following night to the club. ("They raffle a meat tray on Fridays. Not many people go down for it, so I think I'm in with a chance"). He discusses his hatred of pumpkin ("Ah, I just don't think we should eat orange vegetables. I mean I don't really mind pumpkin in a soup. Or a pie. Or a garbage dump".) At 6.30pm he turns on SBS World News. Asking my age he puts my data into the Nielsen TV ratings tracking device they have hooked up. I become a statistic. Every morning at 2.15am on the dot the stats of who-was-watching-what,-when for the day gone are sent by modem, causing a single trill of the telephone throughout the house. "We try to stick in who's watching as accurately as we can," Ted says. "You can cheat it if you like, trick 'em about how many people are watching. But what's the point?"

Jane brings out some dinner and the three of us watch the news. The two of them moan and grumble whenever Bush or Howard are mentioned, but its whenever David Hicks is discussed that they start exclaiming at the screen. "Bring the poor fella home!" cries Jane. "Oh, they will, you wait and see," predicts Ted. "Right before the election, they'll whisk him outta there. You wait and see." After dinner and the news are over Ted flips through the channels. "Ah, what is this?! SHIT-HALF-HOUR?! That's what we call this Chris, when they don't have anything to show of value. So all we get is shit."

I excuse myself (something tells me Ted is going to sit and flick through the shit anyway) and head back to the little flat out the back, where I find three Daddy Longleg spiders in the kitchenette. I clamber onto the bed with a massive round of Afghan bread and three tubs of dip - red pepper, smoky eggplant and Persian chickpea; I tear the bread in chunks and dab . I dance around the flat a while to the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, I watch the West Wing on ABC, I do some readings for International Relations Theory. Outside I can hear a possum growling and wheezing like some terrible monster, and then a sudden fight, and a clatter, and then silence. The night hangs close and heavy around my little shack. I am asleep before midnight.

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THIS arrangement was meant to be temporary, while I scouted the city for a room to suit my needs and budget. But, this is Canberra, and therefore this is almost impossible. The city is flooded with students, the (liveable) cheap rooms near the uni have been claimed. I looked at a room in a house the other day whose two other tenants are currently taking each other to court - she's a miniature Russian woman called Dino (who I thought was a feminine Asian man until I was corrected by two others who had also been to see the room before me - apparently we've all been covering the same ground, all us new arrivals) who likes meditating but never cooks, only microwaves, and requests that tenants scrub the shower (in their private en-suite) down after every time they use it - while he is a one-eyed drug user who lives out the back and doesn't trust anyone to touch his stuff, so while thats where my room would have been had I taken the house (haha!) I couldn't actually see that particular room today, because he was apparently in a bad mood. What's confusing is that despite their feud when I arrived Dino was delivering him a salad.

Anyway, after explaining this particular househunt experience to Ted and Jane they warmly offered for me to move more permanently into their house, outta the granny flat and into the spare room inside the house, once they've cleared some clutter out of the way. So this place, this house with its TV watching monitoring system and its stacks of banjos and guitars and cobwebbed books and antique telephones and cars and buses and its mannequins with sailors caps, and its tiki masks and Buddha heads and its cat and its dog and its possums and its smell of possum shit in the rafters, this place is, for the next four months, going to be my home.