Gardens of WA: We have lost our ‘village’, left only with loneliness

Modern society is often characterised by one overarching feature: loneliness. We live increasingly isolated lives and despite calls for a ‘village’, many of us feel like we are on our own, yearning for a kind of connection we struggle to name. Where did the village go? We lost it little by little in small, fragmented pieces. We lost it when Uber Eats replaced the local kids who used to bring your pizzas. When self-checkouts populated supermarkets and earpods blocked our hearing to conversations with strangers on the train. But perhaps we lost it, most of all, when we swapped our front yards for bigger houses behind taller walls.

Take a look at the next modern house you come across. Does any part of the front yard interact with the street? Probably not. Old houses have verandas and balconies to sit on, low fences to talk over, windows to throw open. Old houses are built in a way that invites interaction. Modern houses are — usually — not.

“New houses are very cut off, everything happens behind the doors,” says Beck Hefferon, from her front veranda.

“We sit here, have a beer and watch the world go by,” adds her husband, Sean.

Beck and Sean’s veranda is the opposite of cut off. A blue picket fence, cut into nautical waves, is all that separates the house from the street. Beyond the fence, ancient philodendrons and monsteras climb the veranda posts, while clivias explode from half wine barrels and nasturtiums self-seed underfoot. Strings of seashells hang from the rafters. Behind them, the front of the house is one giant oceanic mural, painted by Beck in the late ’90s. “It’s probably one of the first murals in Fremantle — we used to have tour buses come down the street to check it out,” Sean proudly tells me.

If Beck’s artwork looks familiar, you’ve probably seen her painting before — another of her murals used to decorate AQWA, back in its ‘Underwater World’ days. Brightly coloured fish and corals burst from the brickwork and, completing the underwater theme, Sean and Beck’s handmade letterbox is a giant fish head (you have to reach into his mouth to grab your mail).

“It used to have teeth, but they all fell out,” Beck laughs. “Kids would come by and put flowers in it, I’d find all sorts of funny little notes in the letterbox. We nearly got rid of it once, and so many people said, ‘Oh you’re not going to get rid of it are you?’ So we kept it.”

Beck and Sean suspect they are the longest-term residents on their street. As new houses with taller fences sprung up around them, their front yard stayed resolutely open to the world. The couches that adorn their veranda recall a time that was not so long ago, and a way of living that was far less isolated. The message is clear: if you’re looking for a village, pull down your front wall; it might just be there waiting for you.