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Paper short abstract

What does it mean to make a home out of a temporary dwelling? This paper presents an autoethnographic account of a year spent renovating and living in a 1970s caravan, reflecting on liveliness, decay, and tensions between permanency and contingency.

Paper long abstract

I met Lilith in June 2020. She had recently turned 47. For the previous five years, the mustard 1973 15” Viscount Ambassador caravan had sat rotting in a coastal Queensland front yard, with an increasingly leaky roof and buckling laminate internal walls. At some point, a lizard had crawled into the wardrobe and died. I thought Lilith was perfect, so she returned home with me to be transformed into something more habitable.

Temporary dwellings like this rundown caravan can be a way forward to the foreseeable, intended to offer control during upended life circumstances, or circumvent unaffordable housing markets and rental crises. Lilith was a chance at personal autonomy and privacy, while capitalising on the financial convenience and connectedness of staying with family during a turbulent time.

This paper presents an auto-ethnographic account of a year spent renovating and living in a caravan. Considering notions of decay and repair, I reflect on living permanently in a dynamic setting that is typically envisioned as being mobile or temporary. Accounting for the sociality of objects and tensions between permanency and contingency, I ask what it means to make a home of dwelling that is seemingly alive, dripping and sparking of its own accord, refusing to keep still. At the same time, what does it mean to live in a dwelling that is equally marked by its own mortality, where aging materials and potential exposure to the elements are more noticeable in a smaller space?