‘We Just Needed a Place to Live’: Canberra Young People’s Ongoing Fight for Affordable Housing

The history of Canberra can be cut many ways. It is, for all intents and purposes, a history of a semi-alpine valley imposed with the burden of Capitol – scoured clean and designed for 25,000 inhabitants, the abstracted ‘smooth faeries’ of Ian Warden’s[1] musings. In reality, we the people grow rogue hairs and hold trauma in our frown lines. The city does the same, with not-entirely-erased road alignments dating back to the 1830s and a palimpsest of planning practices leaving Lego-brick hernias on its northern reaches. Each physical moment inscribed upon this valley, each street and intersection, scarred tree and multi-level apartment block are consequences of and have implications for the notion of Canberra as home.

Across the city’s many building sites there are hanging screens and signs that project a future imagined and promoted, showrooms and turns of phrase, acquired and appropriated artworks. In front of these visions, trucks roll and crack the pavement laid down decades prior for other times and purposes. Shoots of sour thistle, dandelion and petty spurge are quick to colonise the raw aeolian soil. Canberra’s urban stretch marks have emerged from the swell of tension between exploitation and resistance, the weight of trucks and the vegetation flowering in their wake. This is one way to cut the story. It is a story of competing visions of home here in our odd little city. In this way, it is an age-old story about the politics of the structure in which one closes one’s eyes at night.

The theme of this Demos is student activism. Students and young people at large are generally not viewed as actively engaging in or even caring about housing and planning policy in the city. Perhaps this is true. The reason so many students live here in the first place is the choice, made a century ago, to situate Australia’s Capital here. With its assortment of symbolic accruements – of which the Australian National University (ANU) is a well-known one – Canberra draws students from around the world. Many pass through, engaging little in the physical foundations of the city.

However, it is not this simple. Those who look out of the windows of tertiary institutions cannot help but wonder at the beauty and mystery of Black Mountain, and those who are able and desire to can experience the pain of running up Mt Ainslie. Ultimately, these are physical and emotional entanglements with place. Of course, there are also those students and young people who have grown up on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country and have a bodily attachment to this place. So many who have come to this valley have left their mark, and their actions are deeply embedded in the growth and social policies of the Australian Capital Territory.