Yesterday I had the cleaners at the house — a young married couple from India. They sometimes bring along a couple of younger workers, but yesterday it was just the two of them because I’d booked them for five hours. The plan was to pack up as much excess stuff as possible and move it to the storage area under the house.
It actually turned into a really lovely day. At one point the three of us sat down in my lounge room at the far end of the house, going through boxes and talking about their lives. The woman has a master’s degree in some field of computing, but she’s here in Australia on a student visa studying a Certificate in Commercial Cookery. Her husband seems to be along for the ride.
I get the impression they’re quite wealthy. They had just come back from a month in India where they stayed on their family farm, and the man mentioned — very casually — that he has nineteen horses on the property. They also drive a very nice car here in Adelaide, and in some ways I don’t quite understand why they’ve bought a Jim’s Mowing franchise. I don’t know for sure, but part of me wonders if it’s related to visa requirements.
We got a lot done yesterday. The back lounge room where I keep most of my art supplies looks so much cleaner already, and they’re both coming back next week to work on another room.
Nanny used to clean our house. It’s something I think about a lot, even now, just over a year after she passed away. She started as a housekeeper for my parents just before I was born, and once I arrived, her primary role became looking after me. But there was always the cleaning component. She washed and dried clothes, vacuumed, looked after the kitchen and bathrooms, dusted, made up the bedrooms, mopped — all the jobs no one else wanted to do. It’s the toilets that get me. That’s the part I can’t handle when I think back on it all.
As my brother and I grew up, we floated in and out of Mum and Dad’s house for years. I’m back with Mum now, in my mid-40s. And Nanny stayed with us the whole way through — right up until the end of 2023, when she was 90 years old.
When I moved into a share house, Nanny asked to come and see it, and then gave me advice on cleaning. Even then, she would still sometimes do my washing if I took it up to Mum and Dad’s. In every unit I’ve rented, she always came to see it, usually with a load of my washing in her hands.
I’ve been in so many situations where people have spoken down about cleaners, and I take the utmost offence to that. I’m very quick to defend it as a decent, hardworking living — which it absolutely is. But if I’m honest, I can also understand why people don’t want to do it.
I am a huge Meat Loaf fan. At first, I loved Meat Loaf the singer himself — before I understood that the true genius behind Bat Out of Hell was Jim Steinman. Once I realised that, my interest shifted slightly: I still adored Meat Loaf, but I worshipped Steinman.
Back during one of Meatloaf's tours of Australia, Adelaide wasn’t on the list of stops. I was so upset. So I started a miniature campaign to bring him here. I convinced all my friends — maybe ten of them — to call SAFM and say they wanted Meat Loaf to come to Adelaide. SAFM actually played the calls on air, making it sound like Adelaide had a massive, passionate Meat Loaf fan base. I even wrote a letter to the editor of The Advertiser complaining that Adelaide was being shunned, and it was published.
Of course, my tiny, earnest campaign was not the reason the promoters finally added Adelaide to the tour — but a group of us patted ourselves on the back anyway. When I found out Meat Loaf was booked for the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, I decided I had to meet him.
It used to be unspoken local knowledge which hotel big movie stars and rockstars stayed at when they came to Adelaide. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but back then everyone knew. So I put together a perfectly respectable résumé and applied for a job in housekeeping at that exact hotel — purely in the hope of meeting Meat Loaf by cleaning his room.
A few weeks later, I had an interview and got the job. I was a student at the time, which made the timing perfect. Because I had classes some mornings, the housekeeping manager arranged for me to do turndowns in the afternoons on the days I couldn’t work mornings.
The way the hotel operated was fascinating. You didn’t wear your uniform into work; you arrived in your own clothes, and they provided you with a freshly laundered uniform each shift. Housekeeping itself was full-on. I had to train for a while: making beds the proper five-star way, vacuuming, restocking, and getting a room up to spotless hotel standard in — unbelievably — fifteen minutes.
I worked hard, always with the thought in the back of my mind that eventually Meat Loaf would be standing in one of these rooms. The bedroom side of housekeeping was fine… but the bathrooms? And people’s toothbrushes and their toothpaste? That’s where I hit my limit. Every time I stepped into a hotel bathroom, something inside me shrivelled. It made me feel sick to the bone.
I truly developed a new respect for housekeeping. It’s extraordinarily hard work, physical, non-stop, and completely unforgiving. I was young and fit then, and even so it was a workout. But I kept going, determined, the possibility of meeting Meat Loaf tucked away like a secret motivator in the back of my mind.
I remember one day at Mum and Dad’s, they had a friend over for lunch — a senator, and an absolute snob. She asked how my study was going and then whether I was working. I told her I was working in housekeeping at a five-star hotel. She looked at me, scrunched up her nose, and said disapprovingly, “Why on earth would you want to clean up after someone else?”
I told her I loved it. And I really did love it — except for the bathrooms. I would happily do that job now if it weren’t for the bathrooms. In the end I resigned, and my little back-channel mission to meet Meat Loaf never came to fruition. I’ll never get the chance now; Meat Loaf passed away from COVID-19 after being an anti-vaxxer. But there’s still hope for Jim Steinman.
Nanny used to say things like “I make your bed” or “I clean your toilets,” and after working in housekeeping myself, I truly understood — viscerally — what that meant. How hard the work is. How intimate it is. And how easily the world could have dismissed her. People really do look down on these roles. We even pay people like Nanny, or my cleaners now, to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
I just want to say that I would do that job proudly — if it didn’t involve bathrooms. And it’s not even the toilet that bothers me. It’s the basin.
I’m writing some letters to Australian senators, and I will use the responses to create a piece of artwork for an Amnesty International exhibition early next year. I have decided to focus on home demolitions in the West Bank. For me, this isn’t just about bulldozers and broken bricks; it’s about how a whole system has been set up that makes it almost impossible for Palestinians to live normal lives in their own homes, on their own land.
In much of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Palestinians are required to get building permits from the Israeli authorities if they want to build or extend a home. On paper that sounds like ordinary planning law; in reality, those permits are almost never granted.
Large areas where Palestinian communities have lived for generations are zoned as “agricultural,” “green,” or even military “firing zones,” and almost no space is left for legal Palestinian housing. Families still need somewhere to live, so they build anyway.
The same authority that has made it impossible to get a permit then turns up and declares the home “illegal construction” and issues a demolition order.
There are also what are called “punitive demolitions,” where the army destroys or seals the family home of someone accused of carrying out an attack on Israelis. These demolitions are not aimed at the person who committed the act – they’re usually already dead or in prison – but at their relatives: parents, siblings, children.
The stated aim is “deterrence,” but in practice it means entire families losing their home because of something they did not do. Human rights organisations describe this as a form of collective punishment, which is prohibited under international law.
Another cruel aspect is “self-demolition.” In East Jerusalem in particular, families are often given a choice: either the municipality comes with bulldozers and then bills them tens of thousands of dollars in fees, or they demolish their own house to avoid the costs and the risk of jail. So parents are forced to pick up hammers and sledgehammers and physically destroy the rooms their children grew up in.
All of this happens against a backdrop of expanding Israeli settlements, which do receive planning permission and state support. So home demolitions are not just isolated incidents; they are part of a wider policy that reshapes the land, deciding who gets to build a future there and who is made to live with the constant threat of losing everything.
I don’t know how anyone can defend this practice, how anyone can defend Israel when it comes to home demolitions. If something like this happened in Australia — if the government bulldozed the homes of entire families because of a planning dispute, or because a relative was accused of a crime — there would be national outrage.
Families would be offered compensation, legal support, counselling, emergency housing, and an investigation into how such a violation of basic rights was allowed to occur. In the occupied territories, this isn’t just permitted; it’s policy.
In the West Bank, these demolitions function as collective punishment. Even the language used by Israeli officials — “deterrence,” “pressure,” “creating consequences” — makes it clear that the target is not just an individual but the family, the community, the entire population under occupation.
The intent is cruel: to frighten, to uproot, to make life so unstable and unbearable that people eventually leave. When you look at the patterns — the almost impossible permit system, the demolitions, the forced “self-demolition,” and the expansion of settlements alongside it — it becomes impossible to pretend this is anything other than deliberate.
I intend to write to Australian senators and ask them how they feel about these demolitions, and what they believe the Australian government should do in response. I want to know whether they think Australia has a responsibility to support affected Palestinians whose homes are being destroyed, and whether they believe we should send a clear message to the Israeli government that this practice is unacceptable. I will collate the responses, turning their words — or their silence — into part of the story I want to tell.
In light of the home demolitions, and everything I’ve been learning about them, I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversations happening at the rallies and vigils I’ve been going to. There’s a lot of talk about BDS — the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. People speak about it passionately, and I understand why. But I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.
I think it’s one thing to boycott the Israeli government, its policies, and the institutions directly involved in the occupation. That makes sense to me. But anything that affects ordinary Israeli people in their daily lives starts to feel like a contradiction in itself. It borders on the very thing I’m trying to speak out against: collective punishment.
I don’t believe in punishing people for the actions of their government. I don’t believe in making families or children carry the weight of political decisions they did not make. And so I find myself caught between wanting to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and wanting to remain true to a principle that has always mattered to me — that human rights are universal, and that we don’t promote justice by inflicting suffering on innocent people.
