This was published in the Age on Saturday - it’s been paywalled so I thought I would also share it here!
I wrote a long thing about teenage bedrooms for the critical part of my PhD which cited lots of writers who have had interesting things to say on the subject from Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s work on Bedroom Culture, to Sian Lincoln's work on ‘Youth Culture & Private Space’ - how I dream of there being a youth culture museum in Australia like the one in the UK … but for now the rather brilliant Rennie Ellis exhibition at the State Library will have to do.
I know I keep saying I’ve finished my PhD but on Friday I honestly and truly submitted the final amendments. Finishing has coincided with me losing my day-job, so if you see me scrambling you’ll know why. Apparently post-PhD depression is a thing. I have been feeling some of that, a sudden realisation that it’s 2024 and not, 2019. I’m also glad I did it. It meant I actually had some regular money coming in during the pandemic, and could work from home at a time when my family needed it. But now there is a shift again. And I like to think -I hope - that what I’m feeling (aside from AAGHHHHHH!) is a freeing up of brain-space, and a chance to put down some of the things I’ve been dreaming about.
A Whole Other World
Recently I stayed at friend’s place and her thirteen-year-old daughter kindly let me sleep in her bedroom. To be clear: the daughter was staying elsewhere. I lay on the single bed, under her muslin canopy, in the cosy glow of fairylights and took in my surroundings: books, clothes, mementos, a ceramic terrier she’d made in art class, and wall-to-wall Eminem posters. I found myself reflecting on my own teenage bedroom, how it had served as my power spot and refuge, and I wondered if I’d ever so fully inhabited a space since.
For all of my childhood I shared a bedroom. When you’re spoiled for siblings you become adept at carving out places for privacy. You could be private in your head, I learned that early on. You could carry a whole other world in there. When my parents decided to renovate, I finally had a room of my own. One of my first alterations was create a bunker with my bookshelf, so that anyone who opened the door wouldn’t see me straight away. Behind the bunker, I’d recline on pillows and stare at the pictures on my walls, my collage of teenage dreaming. My sisters and I shared and pillaged images from Smash Hits or Dolly, or even TV Week. Blu tack became a currency. We had to claim different pop stars so we could divvy up the posters without bloodshed.
Dolly was our Design Files. An article that stands out in my memory was called, “Big Ideas for a Tiny Bedroom.” It was a tour of a teenage girl’s bedroom that highlighed her ingenious use of space. She had a fold-down desk and a fold-up chair. She stored her pyjamas in a small chest, which doubled as an “entertainment centre” with her TV, telephone and lamp on top. (I could manage the lamp but the other two objects fell outside my budget). Personal objects are never just objects. They are clues, data, intell. I took note of the pinboard, the cute stationary holder, the Fiorucci print, the dried flower arrangement. Her bed was dressed up like a couch with cushions flush against the wall. I decided that the girl was feminine, organised and popular. She probably wrote poetry. She may have even been published in Dolly’s very own Poet’s Corner, something I aspired to, but, alas, would never achieve.
Another article to make its mark came from Mimi Pond’s The Valley Girls’ Guide to Life, a joke ethnography that I took very seriously. Pond used words like habitat and environment to describe the Valley Girl’s bedroom. To me these scientific terms acknowledged the teenager as fully realized, not just an undeveloped half-person. But then:
“Things to have in your bedroom are: a rainbow mobile, a totally awesome sound system, all your cosmetics out so you can have everything at your fingertips (perfume and lip-gloss and nail polish go in little baskets everywhere), unicorns are totally cool, Stevie Nicks collects them too …”
I had little baskets everywhere but not nearly enough make up to fill them. Often a basket would only contain one item: a tube of Bonnie Bell lip-gloss, plum nail polish, or an eyeshadow palette in autumnal shades. Now, when I think of these vessels with their sole cargo I think of special collections, prize exhibits; and synecdoche: one thing standing for all the things together. girlhood, performance, wishing.
Movies also taught me how a teenage bedroom should be. In the opening scenes of Pretty in Pink, the camera tracks slowly over Andie’s bedroom, offering an abundance of visual detail. From her make-up, to her vintage clothes draped everywhere, to her photos and books, I gleaned a girl, femme (make-up, pink), who liked art (Picasso print) and was serious about school (textbooks). The photos on her mirror (BFFs Ducky and Jen) revealed social attachments, and the glimpsed photo of her mother hinted at a mystery. The camera’s caress of Andie’s bedroom lasted mere seconds but it was enough for me to covet her whole world. My main takeaway was that my bedroom should have a dizzying profusion of mess and stuff. I started op-shopping with a vengeance.
In Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, the production designer and set decorator wanted the character’s bedroom to show her layers of history, and echo the feeling of coming of age. They did this by mixing past and present objects and ephemera. For Lady Bird’s collaged walls, they looked for images that didn’t need clearance, or made their own, including the “Lady Bird for President” posters. Lady Bird’s bedroom, with its pink walls, ribbons, band posters, art experiments, and prints of wolves and wild birds, holds up the tradition of teenage mess, and signals to the complexity of a person living in the liminal.
Photos of my teenage bedroom shows a similar self-in-flux: the would-be sophisticate inside the outer-suburban sadgirl. There are Jim Beam bottles that I’ve repurposed as vases, and black and white photo-strips of friends in goofy poses. One wall bears a “deep”self-portrait, another has posters of dinosaurs. For a while I curated an altar with tarot cards and crystals and incense and rune-stones, tools to bring me love and riches, or something beyond my daily boredom. In my late teens I was writing and painting most nights, but my creations rarely left the house. I didn’t know what to do with them, or myself. The photos only give a glimpse, but I know that inside those four walls I made myself up. I fell into books and music, lied in my diary, scoffed chocolate, smoked myself sick, lorded my wins, licked my wounds, cried big tears, and felt everything as if feeling was an artform.
There’s a tumblr dedicated to teenage bedrooms on screen. Sometimes, when I’m scrolling it, a still will jump out at me, some detail I remember, and was already all over back in the day. I’ll have a minute of silence for the place (and self) now lost to the past.
When my parents sold our family home I felt no sadness; I was eager to get to my next self. There followed a pause to collect myself before I moved into my first share-house, a Fitzroy worker’s cottage. The house had a name, ‘Lanark’, a Welsh word meaning “clear space”. I took this as a directive. I would not bleed my identity all over my new space. I bought a futon and red cotton sheets, but kept the decor muted. My possessions were portable and utilitarian and I aspired to leave no traces. In this way I could make it look like I had no past. I had never been a teenager with a teenage bedroom. I had simply arrived.