Stranger In The Lounge

Newcastle Herald

Monday March 8, 1999

Jeff Corbett

IT was a system that provided accommodation for hundreds of thousands of Australians but suddenly it's gone.

Well, suddenly in the past 20 or so years, if you know what I mean.

Boarding in someone's home was the first choice of accommodation for many, and perhaps even most, single people who were not in their hometown or who were leaving home.

Not in what we call boarding houses ? staying in one of these was quite different from staying as a paying guest in someone's home.

Boarding houses were generally big houses that had been converted to a type of accommodation-only hotel; there were many at Mayfield and other suburbs next to Newcastle's industrial belt.

But the difference was more than one of scale.

Boarding in someone's home was more genteel, more respectable, and it was very common practice until, I'd say, the mid 70s.

Sure, it happens now, although on nowhere near the same scale. I don't know, for example, a single soul who boards or who takes boarders when 25 years ago I would have known quite a few in each category.

The bed-and-breakfast set-ups that have become popular in the past two or three years are in private homes but they are short-term stays and much like staying in a serviced apartment.

I've boarded at Coonamble and Taree, in my days as a cadet journalist, and for shorter spells in England, and no promise of cut lunches and good cooking would get me to repeat the experience.

Not that any of the stints were unpleasant. It was just that I could never become accustomed to living in someone else's home.

A certain caution and courtesy was required and that precluded ease.

To find someone who would take in a boarder, which was the common expression, was the first thing to do on arriving in a new town for a new job.

It was largely word of mouth in country towns, and so I was told within an hour of arriving in Coonamble in 1971 that Mrs James down behind the oval took in a boarder from time to time.

She only took in nice boys, old Mrs James told me as she eyed me up and down. One was a school teacher, I remember her telling me as proof of her home's respectability.

There were many rules. I was to call her Ma or Mrs James (I chose the latter) and her husband Mr James.

And, the bit that was hardest, I was never to argue with Mr James ? he was a very clever man who would not put up with dissent from pups like me. Mr James, I quickly learnt, was an ignorant old fool who spent his life sitting in the kitchen abusing his guests' generation.

Mrs James was loudly distraught when I left a few months later to try life with a younger family ? I was her first boarder ever to leave for somewhere else.

Boarding, I soon realised, required elastic tolerances.

One otherwise clean family would feed the family dogs from their plates as they ate dinner; you might be allowed only one piece of fruit per day; in one home boarders (there were three of us) were to leave the family members in the loungeroom by 9.30pm.

Still, many boarders did become de facto members of the family. Some young people I knew kept in touch with their boarding family for years after they moved on.

Something has changed now, though.

Young people who would have been the boarders of old get flats together.

Maybe it's because they have more money, maybe it's because their habits and lifestyle won't be acceptable in a family environment.

There is still, though, demand for homes that will take boarders, and I hope to write about that this week.

© 1999 Newcastle Herald

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