the bookshelves i've kept

Church Street, Wollongong

My first sharehouse was on Church Street. It was a Christian sharehouse, which meant that only women lived there and you’d often find someone sitting in the back garden with their finger pressed firmly between the pages of a Women’s Bible.

I was 18 and I took the smallest room. I crammed my single mattress and black bed frame into corner, wall to wall, and filled the built-in with clothes. I didn’t need a bigger bed even if it did fit. My Christian boyfriend would sleep on the couch if he visited – we were acutely aware of the optics of two celibate and devout fundamentalist teenagers sharing a bed.

I lined the small pile of books from my childhood home on the floor. They were a haven for dust and mice, but I wanted them visible. John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Dostoyevsky. I wanted to see evidence of the growing intellect that I would accrue at university and would later become my crutch.

The mice increased in number in the months that I lived there. Once, in a spot of mania maybe, my housemate cornered one in the hallway and reached for the only thing closest to her to kill it with: a lead pencil. She dropped its lifeless, skewered body into the garden bin while we watched in both fear and admiration. After trying more humane methods, with honey and a bowl of water, we gave up and let them live. We would hear them scamper across the floor while we ate KFC in bed with the coins we found under car seats.

The Farm, Araluen

I didn’t bring my books to the farm, however I was there long enough to purchase more from Book Depository and have them delivered to the stifling demountable I was living in over summer. Every John Green book was purchased for my hopelessly romantic 19-year-old heart. Robert Frost’s poems too.

I was out there pruning baby peach trees, clapping my hands to scare away the snakes in the long grass and listening to Taylor Swift’s Red album. Every day, I would sit under the lone tree in the field and read my book in the shade.

I lived on a diet of words, peaches and bush pigs doused in beer on a spit.

Utrecht, The Netherlands

For the seven months I was in Europe, I slowly collected enough books from the bookstores I visited that I had to fly home with them stuffed in my winter coat pockets and in the lining of my pants. I had $7000AUD for 7 months – food, travel, accommodation. And still, I found the money for books. I kept all of them. The English Literature readers from my studies, the origins of Utopic Fiction, White Noise by Don DeLillo.

The Squat, Artarmon

Squatting on the floor of a due-to-be-demolished apartment. Mouldy walls, a single mattress on the floor, a book and my post-graduate study notes beside it. There was no fridge or cooking appliances, and for a period I lived off Tim Tam Chillers from Gloria Jeans for breakfast and the three-for-$10 meal deals at the Chinese restaurant in the mall at the end of the day.

Boys House, Artarmon

My first bookshelf. A big, white thing. Probably something Dad found on the side of the road. Maybe it was built into the wall, I can’t remember. I didn’t have enough to fill it from top to bottom, so I padded it out by facing the books cover to front.

My bedroom had an ensuite with a double shower. When you turned both of the showerheads on, they never reached the same temperature. The shower was my offering to men, when I told them I had left the church and didn’t know how to sex but hey, look at my shower! We can both fit in there! That’s hot, right?

East Lindfield

I was given a bedroom for my books, and they sat in a shelving unit while I shared a bedroom with my boyfriend. I barely went into that room for nine months, and I didn’t read all that much either, so much was I swept into the world of a family who was kind and generous and socially active. Still, I bought them. The Atomic Weight of Love. We Need to Talk About Kevin. Michael Leunig’s cartoons and poetry.

Dee Why

A huge house of booksellers set on a cliff, overlooking the sea. Two stories with built-in bookshelves filled to the brim. I kept my paperbacks in my bedroom, a room similar to that of Church Street: a built-in, single bed and piles leaning in towers on the floor. I felt protective over the stories. I didn’t want to share them. I wanted my identity to be kept in this tiny little box of a room.

It didn’t last very long. A short-lived romance with a housemate who, unbeknownst to me, was the unrequited love of another housemate sent me tip-toeing out of the nest, wheeling my broken-down motorbike into the back of a ute and driving away.

Home

Back at Mum and Dad’s – my bedroom in the garage. My books in boxes. $800 to my name, no car and a broken bike, no job but a commitment to going freelance in something I had never studied. Within six weeks I was making enough money to move out again. The boxes were pushed onto the back of another ute tray and driven back to the south coast.

Bellambi

My books on a shelf in the loungeroom. How desperately I wanted them in my bedroom, in my private cave. The shelf sat beside my housemate’s, who had many of the same titles. Two friends made of paper.

I rode my motorbike, lived off Uber Eats delivered to the windowsill of the bath, had a preposterous number of lovers and finally, at age 25, was earning enough to afford books from the local book store, not Amazon-owned Book Depository.

Bourke Street

After a trip to Sri Lanka and another few months driving around Europe and living in the boot of a hatchback, I moved to Bourke Street.

I moved two white shelves into a house that was sinking into the earth. Dust would creep in on a windy day, between the walls and the floorboards. Stick your finger in the gap and you’ll feel the earth on your fingertips. There was a revolving door of housemates and wayward travellers and a sink that was always full of dishes.

Scarborough

A house with a giant dragon attached to the facade of the house. A triangular room halfway up a spiral staircase with a bed built into a bookshelf, one with a secret latch that opened and revealed a small room with a ladder. A curtain for a bedroom door, which flittered behind the many men that chose to inhabit my space.

I bought a business, moved to the big bedroom upstairs with the balcony overlooking the sea, tag teamed with my housemate for a daily bath.

“First day of the rest of your life, Ruby,” he’d say to me as we’d pass by the kitchen, towels slung over our shoulders.

Finally, I found the women: Lorrie Moore. Rebecca Solnit. Zadie Smith. My literary horizons expanded.

Dolls Point

The first place to myself, a little two-bedroom apartment by the sea, closer to my office. The place I spent most of the second lockdown, alone. Three shelves from Ikea were put together on the floor of the loungeroom with the help of Sal.

More men. Some walk up to the shelves and read the spines, others look from across the kitchen and say things like ‘How many of those have you actually read’ and ‘That must be a bitch to move’.

The Hinterlands

Boxes and boxes in the back of the ute for an impulse move to the Northern Rivers with a new man. An open plan studio where the books become decor as much as the art did. Afternoons curled up on the sunbed while the rain blanketed the hills with grey, cracking the spines of novels bought from town.

Oatley

A bookshelf from Marketplace was bought in Campbelltown and strapped to the roof of my ute. Another, from Vinnies. A feature wall of books upon entry. My collection merged with his: a swathe of mountaineering/adventure books.

An acknowledgement of the whiteness of my reading. Reading more: Audre Lord, Tricia Hersey, Melissa Lucashenko.

Thirroul

The first time I’ve culled boxes of them, unafraid to detach myself from the armour that once told the world that I was smart and worldly and worthy. Less attached to the need to project an insecurity that was slowly peeling off me like a banana.

A place to call my own, a place to adorn with the things I love on the eve of 30. Exposed beams, polished concrete floors, kitchen bench cum dining table cum work desk. Stacking the piles in the hall, giving them away to passing friends. Forgetting to update GoodReads, forgetting to keep track of who had the copy of what, losing my grip on the pages that once offered escape.