Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: The tall story

When do you paint over a ‘tall wall’?

You know that wall where you measure your kids? Where you use a pencil or pen to do the unthinkable: write on the wall! But this is permissible, because it’s not graffiti, it’s data. It’s how you mark your child has grown over time. Sometimes you measure yourself there for fun, and to watch your child gain centimetres as gravity and age take yours. Tall walls are messy. They are part of the story of your home.

I rented until I was 41. I had five kids but I couldn’t do a tall wall. When you are a tenant you don’t get to write on your landlord’s walls. I always felt weirdly jealous of people who owned their homes. Not just the security, but the tall wall. If they had kids, there would be an area near the pantry where children were regularly measured. When the parent would grab the ruler and say: ‘come up against the tall wall, I think you’ve grown.’

Then the child would stretch itself out as long and tall as they could to receive the ruler, slid through the hair, balancing precisely on the top of the head, proving the thesis that the child had indeed grown. A new pencil mark is made with a roughly drawn line. A name is added and a date. ‘You’ve grown 2cm in three months!’ Like growth is an achievement that can be measured in pencil.

These strange, snaking measurements aren’t for renters. Renters don’t get to tell the story of their children’s growth. Otherwise there would be random measurements of unknown and unrelated children on walls that hold families who have never met. When you rent you have to bring a piece of wood. In the landscape of rental insecurity, that’s your continuity. Not a home, with walls, a kitchen, a bathroom, bedrooms, a backyard. A long piece of wood. And when you move house because the rent became unaffordable, or the owners were selling, or moving back in, you hopefully found a new place where you could mount your piece of wood. The piece of wood that told the story of your family from baby to adult.

I don’t know why, but I’m standing looking at my youngest daughter’s tall wall and I have this realisation. It makes me feel sad. We built this home and moved here when my 16-year-old was three. There are 13 years of growth. She’s close to my height now so the marks are fast and furious, and show no signs of slowing down. I place my finger on the wall and I travel in time. I track the years and her height, from toddler to teen, and I feel this satisfaction in knowing she grew in this room, in this house, in this street, in this town.

That is what secure housing gave us. A place for children to grow and be measured. A place to leave and come home to. A place for homework and Sunday dinners and birthday parties. A place to feel safe. Secure housing gave us belonging. It gave us not just a place that was home, but the broader deeper sense of what home means. Not just what belongs to you but to who and what you belong to. It’s simple, but it’s profound and somehow when I’m looking at the pencil and pen inscriptions that snake up the wall I get it.

Everyone deserves a home. Walls they can write not only their kids’ height, but the stories of their lives.

Mandy Nolan is talking resilience and revolution, homelessness and hope with Madeleine West for ‘SMALL SHIFT – conversations of resilience’ for The SHIFT Project’s launch of their small giving program at Crystalbrook in Byron on Thursday, 24 July at 7pm. Tickets from shiftproject.org.au.

• Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last two federal elections. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.