My immigrant family never slept that first week in our newly-rented Sydney house. Too fearful were we of burglary or attack. There were no bars on the windows, no fence securing our plot. Anyone could breach the flimsy lock that kept us safe from intruders and find a way to shatter our new-found peace.
But this was precisely the reason we'd moved here: to give our children a more functional, secure upbringing away from our crime-ridden country of birth.
Fear soon dissipated. The lack of fencing between the neighbour's house and ours allowed for ease of movement when we needed to borrow a cup of sugar or drop off the Sunday papers. More than once we woke up to find we'd somehow left the front door wide open before going to sleep the night before. Often I returned home from daytime outings to discover the back door unlocked, the front door ajar.
Nothing was ever stolen. The peace remained intact, shattering instead the certainty expressed by one of the protagonists in Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall that 'good fences make good neighbours'.
As immigrants assimilating into Australia, the lack of fences and other security arrangements reinforced for us the fact that it was a safe and respectful country we'd chosen to move to. It wasn't good fences that made good neighbours, but rather their absence that did so. This erasing of margins implied at once both mutual trust and an innate respect for the invisible boundaries that demarcated people's personal space.
It also suggested that fences weren't necessary to keep out, or to rein in, the dangers, the problems, the issues, the secrets – the 'cows' referred to by the speaker in Frost's poem – roaming both the streets and people's front yards.
I wonder if I could put a notion in his head, the narrator asks. Why do [fences] make good neighbours? Isn't it where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
There are no cows either in this quiet Sydney suburb that we now call home. Yet 13 years after lying there in fright at the lack of fences, at the strong possibility of 'cows' roaming in and out of our space, these delineations have proliferated. Our own house, lined with shrubbery along its frontage and a hole-ridden fence at the back through which we can chat to the neighbour behind us (but through which our dogs can thankfully not escape) is