‘Strangers in my home’: Disaster and the durability of the private realm

The ‘rightful’ place of strangers

It is clear that the home is a place imbued with particular sets of meanings associated with privacy, security and freedom to express one’s identity. These qualities are partly derived from the physical and symbolic signifiers that demarcate the boundary between the home and the outside world, placing neighbours and strangers outside unless invited in. The private realm, then, is not devoid of strangers, but it is not their natural environment. Instead, as scholars from Simmel (1908/1950) to Bauman (1993) have maintained, the ‘rightful’ place of the stranger is the public realm – usually public city spaces.

Any analysis of the stranger begins with Simmel (1908/1950) who observed that the role of the stranger has changed in the shift from pre-modern settlements to the modern city. In this new urban environment, the stranger is not ‘the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather … the person who comes today and stays tomorrow’ (Simmel, 1908/1950). The stranger is close by in spatial terms, but lacking all but the most generic forms of commonality to be rendered familiar. Nevertheless, the stranger has a particular durable proximity in the city that city dwellers must confront and negotiate. Provided they are ‘correctly’ encountered in public spaces, strangers are an everyday phenomenon; an essential part of the urban environment, sufficiently ordinary and rarely considered an interesting social phenomenon. Simmel also identifies an ‘attitude of objectivity’ within the stranger based upon the combination of indifference and involvement that he or she brings to the group. This subjective detachment is a quality possessed by all strangers regardless of their intent, and while it can be a positive quality in the public sphere when manifest as a cosmopolitan disposition towards diversity, the lack of consideration of history, memory and attachments in the sphere of other people’s homes renders the stranger particularly unwelcome in that space, as we later show.

While the locus of the stranger is the modern city or the public realm, time-space compression and increased mobility in late modernity have ruptured what was once a clear convergence of physical and social space, rendering the task of identifying strangers according to which spatial realm they occupy increasingly difficult. As Bauman (1995) observes, strangers obscure the neat boundaries between different realms of life; between physical proximity and social distance; and between the safe and suspicious.

In collective memory at least, neighbourhoods were once places of familiarity, and even if neighbours were not acquaintances, they were not strangers. They had a latent identity: ‘always potentially within sight, always leaning towards the intimacy pole, always a prospective partner of intercourse and biography sharing’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 151). In many respects, the neighbourhood as a parochial space comprising co-inhabitants with a shared sense of identity as neighbours, despite often being unacquainted (Laurier, Whyte, & Buckner, 2002), has endured. However, Bauman argues – and indeed as this article shows – the liminality or in-betweenness of neighbourhoods brings the stranger closer to home, occupying the middle ground between the near and the familiar on the one hand, and the distant and the alien on the other.

Moreover, whereas the presence of strangers in the public sphere is anticipated and managed by well-established rules of civil inattention (Bauman, 1993; Lofland, 1989a), the existence of strangers in more familiar spaces turns these conventions on their head, creating ‘situations always pregnant with false steps and costly blunders’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 149). When strangers move even closer into familiar domains, the rules governing interaction become increasingly incongruous and possibly threatening in social space. Expressions of civil inattention that are standard and expected in the public realm are rendered absurd when those strangers are encountered, de-contextualised, in the most familiar and private realm of the home. In what follows, we illustrate this through the experiences of flood victims during the 2011 Queensland floods, showing how the disaster enabled the free movement of the stranger – albeit one mostly bearing goodwill – from the public and parochial to the private realms and how this rendered flood victims increasingly uneasy to the point where the unmaking of the home was compounded by the stranger’s presence.

Cue the stranger: Encounters in the parochial realm

Outside of disaster events, encounters with strangers typically take place in public urban or parochial spaces and are sufficiently ordinary to be unremarkable. Yet in the aftermath of the flooding, strangers were an extra-ordinary phenomenon on the damaged and muddy streets of Brisbane and Ipswich as they arrived en masse, walking down local streets armed with shovels, buckets and other cleaning implements. Flood victims recalled the arrival of these volunteer-strangers, describing them in ways that enhanced their strangeness and conceived them as initially threatening as they descended ‘mob like’ onto local streets:

… you’d see these swarms of people just coming down the street. (Female, Suburb 1)

While we were sitting out in the front yard, I thought there was an angry mob going down the street. But they were volunteers. There were about 30 people marching down the street with brooms and shovels and everything, just offering help to anybody. (Female, Suburb 3)

Conventional understandings of the stranger, such as those of Bauman (1993), depict the stranger as most threatening when he or she is already embedded within the life-world – an incurable irritant who is ever-present, spatially near but socially distant. Prior to late modernity, however, the stranger was typically an outsider from alien spaces (Bauman, 1993); a wanderer ‘who comes today and goes tomorrow’ (Simmel, 1908/1950, p. 402) but who, in the meantime, may be treated as an enemy or guest as determined by the host. In the urban context, this perspective on strangers has largely disappeared in all but the private realm. Yet interviewees’ descriptions of the volunteers conformed with these early accounts of the stranger as alien rather than neighbour in the way they viewed all but familiar faces as ‘outsiders coming in’, regardless of who they were or where they were from.

The Mud Army came through and they were there. We saw them walking in from early in the morning. These people with shovels and stuff and it’s like wow this is unbelievable that they got as close as they could, parked their cars and went – walked through. (Male, Suburb 4)

But the helpers were not the people who lost their homes. They were people from outside. We didn’t know them at all. (Female, Suburb 4)

People were coming from the outside, coming in. (Female, Suburb 1)

If, as Bauman (1993) suggests, family, friends, neighbours and strangers can be placed along a continuum of familiarity and strangeness, the volunteer strangers were located at the furthest end of the stranger pole for they were not merely strangers, but total strangers; complete strangers; people with whom residents were not even vaguely familiar or able to be classified:

I probably recognised some, and then there were just the complete strangers that turned up with a bucket and a mop saying, ‘do you want any help?’ (Female, Suburb 1)

Interviewer: Were these people you already knew?

Male (Suburb 3): No. Total strangers.

Located at this far end of the familiarity continuum, strangers can become so strange that they are hardly known to exist (Bauman, 1993, p. 149). More colloquially, they were routinely termed by participants as ‘random’ in a slightly derogatory sense as people who are not merely unfamiliar or unspecified, but of no real consequence: indiscriminate, faceless and undefinable:

… he [a neighbour] had other people in there helping, just random people coming in with pressure cleaners and that sort of thing. (Couple, Suburb 4)

They were just random volunteers. Yeah, random volunteers. (Female, Suburb 3)

… then there were just some random collection of people. (Female, Suburb 3)

While the language used by interviewees to describe the volunteer-strangers might appear dismissive, it does not mean that they were not welcomed or appreciated – although perceptions did change according to the conduct of the volunteers once they entered someone’s home. Rather, it is indicative of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the situation flood victims found themselves in, with their homes ravaged by floodwater and the mass descent of total strangers into their home territory. As they began interacting with these strangers over the course of the clean-up, they learnt that this random assortment of helpers was made up of people from nearby streets who had been fortunate enough to escape flooding of their own properties and others from beyond the local area who, for their own reasons, had elected to come and help. The former group were subsequently re-categorised as ‘locals’ once it was affirmed that they belonged to the area. But the presence of the latter, outsider, stranger warranted explanation, which was provided on the basis of emergent biographical contours:

This particular girl was a stranger to us all, but she used to live in [Brisbane] and she only moved to Sydney about a week before the floods. … She was watching it on TV in Sydney and thought I’ve just got to go back and help, so she flew to the Gold Coast, which is where her mother lives, and got her mother’s car and then just drove straight up here. (Female, Suburb 3)

Through all of this, the parochial realm of the neighbourhood became a liminal space where the familiar and the routine were suspended and replaced with something that was simultaneously public, parochial and private. Under non-disaster conditions, these three spheres may blur around the boundaries, but each has its own distinct set of regularities in the kinds of social relationships typically enacted; the forms of institutions in place; and the geographical space associated with each realm. For Hunter (1985, p. 235), the parochial order is qualitatively different from the public: ‘it is not a world of citizen strangers and rarely are the formal agents of social control observed or central to its operations’. Further, it is only in the public realm where each of these three domains converge, leaving the social order of the suburb and the home intact.

But in the aftermath of the flood, conventions were turned on their head and the parochial realm of the neighbourhood took on the guise of the public, although little of the institutional control of the public realm existed in these early days of the clean-up. While strangers descended, local streets were filled with heavy trucks and formal agents of the state – the police, the army and the State Emergency Service (SES) – but in emergency response mode, none of them imposed much control over volunteers. It was also not a pure public space since encounters with strangers did not conform to the usual standards of inconsequential civil inattentiveness or ‘mis-meetingness’ (Bauman, 1993; Lofland, 1989a). Instead, there was an intentionality to these interactions. Strangers drove down flooded streets to provide food and drink to those cleaning up, while neighbours and community groups set up tables and barbecues in public spaces which served as hubs where others could bring food to share and where tired workers could find refreshment. At least in this context, strangers remained in their ‘rightful’ place outside of the home, locating themselves in streets and parks where residents could seek out their assistance without any encroachment of the private sphere by the public. Yet, there were many more cases where volunteer-strangers, temporarily dislocated from everyday life by the liminal space of the disaster zone, behaved in ways that they might not normally consider by entering flooded homes and, with varying degrees of consent from the resident, embarking on a self-fashioned campaign to clean up the mess.

Strangers in my home: An altruistic form of home unmaking

While the arrival of strangers in the parochial realm was accepted, despite being unusual and uncontrolled, their presence became more problematic as they began moving, with relative ease, into the private realm of the home. Such seemingly irregular behaviour can be understood with reference to the concept of home unmaking (Baxter & Brickell, 2014) as it played out in several ways. First, institutional actors, such as the State Emergency Service (SES), the army, the fire brigade, the police and local council workers had clearly demarcated tasks (restoring local infrastructure, maintaining law and order and collecting discarded items left outside the home) that relegated them to the parochial realm. While there were occasions that required them to enter individual properties, their access into the home was rendered far less problematic than that of the volunteers. This is partly because emergency personnel were readily identifiable as a distinct category of actor by virtue of their uniforms, marked vehicles and ID badges, which bestowed upon them an impression of legitimacy and authority. In addition, institutional actors often had a specific and time-limited task that accounted for their need to enter homes, such as hosing out mud-coated properties once they had been emptied of their contents and checking the safety of domestic electricity supplies. In contrast, volunteers were far less classifiable or accountable both in their appearance – dressed as they were in a civil uniform of old work clothes – and in their intentions, which vaguely revolved around a desire to ‘help’. With emergency service personnel occupied with their own work in the parochial realm, volunteers were left to channel their aid towards the domestic realm and the initial stages of cleaning up, which involved residents sorting through their belongings to decide what should be discarded and what could be salvaged and cleaned. Possibly empathising with their fellow citizens over the profound unmaking of their homes, volunteers came by the dozen to help with these tasks.

Upon arrival, their entry into private residences was also facilitated by the unmaking of the physical and symbolic ‘boundary markers’ (Goffman, 1971, p. 42) of the home. Usually private domestic lives played out in the streets as doors to homes were flung open, fences dismantled, and damaged household and personal items were thrown onto piles in the street ready for Council collection. Domestic duties such as food preparation and consumption, the washing of crockery and the sorting of personal belongings were also relocated outside of the home for all to witness and partake. This displacement of the private realm into the parochial realm enabled deeply entrenched divisions between public and private to be flouted, thereby enabling ‘total strangers’ to walk into people’s homes uninvited:

There were so many of them and people would come in, no knocking, just come in and say, ‘are you right here? Do you need a hand?’ (Female, Suburb 2)

When I got back [from the evacuation centre], I came home to strangers all in my house and I thought who the hell these people are. What’s going on? (Male, Suburb 3)

For the stranger, the suburban street was transformed from its normal quiet orderliness into a temporary public realm full of mud, chaos, damaged furniture, earth moving equipment, emergency services and thousands of other volunteers. For the flooded householders, the space of the home, while radically altered by mud and water, was still the private realm and subject to the same spatial values that it always had been. Residents expressed disbelief at the way volunteers flouted the conventions of the host–guest relationship by entering their homes without invitation. In the excerpt below, this even occurred in the lead-up to the flood as the waters rose and residents began packing up as much of their homes as possible as they prepared to evacuate:

When we were moving stuff up we had a man that walked in our front door right to the back, to find us. He said, ‘have you been in a flood before?’ We were looking at him: ‘you’ve just walked into our house mate’. We said, ‘no …’. He said, ‘where’s your bathroom?’ So we took him to the bathroom. He had two screwdrivers and a bunch of plastic bags. He unscrewed the drains, lifted them up, put a plastic bag down and re-screwed it. He said, ‘now you do that to every single drain in your house and you won’t have sewage backing up into your place’. (Male, Suburb 4)

The appearance of strangers in the private realm deprives the resident of the resources normally deployed in the public realm for dealing with those who can be categorised as fellow commuters, waiters, loitering youth or families. If the stranger is someone who is categorised rather than known as an individual, then the stranger during the flood was not only in the wrong realm, but was also difficult to categorise, further robbing the flooded resident of the ability to psychologically prepare or respond to this person in the private space of the home. Some residents described how they sought to rectify this by demanding of volunteers ‘who are you?’ and by establishing rules about sub-spaces within the home that strangers were allowed to enter and those that they could not. Kitchens and garages were considered more acceptable for strangers to access, whereas bedrooms were considered too private for the gaze of a stranger (Korosec-Serfaty & Bolitt, 1986) and entry was reserved for close friends and family. As one participant explained, there was a high level of discomfort in having even those they were closest to sorting through their personal belongings, ‘let alone other people’.

Yet other participants reported being too overwhelmed – by the flood itself and by the sheer number of people who had descended upon them – to properly manage the movement of strangers in their home. For these people, the inversion or loss of control turned them into spectators in their own private realm:

These people came in to help and it was really hard to control. I didn’t want help, actually. She [a volunteer] talked me into it [receiving help], but they had almost no regard for your stuff and things, which I thought were recoverable but got thrown out. (Couple, Suburb 2)

This apparent disregard for residents’ personal belongings was a key theme in participants’ accounts of their flood experience and constituted another form of home unmaking in the way volunteers handled private possessions they recovered from people’s homes and made autonomous judgements about their worth. Along with furniture, more personal belongings, such as clothes, dinner and glassware, photographs and family heirlooms, were left muddy and damaged from the flood water, and seemingly irrecoverable. Where, ordinarily, these items would remain the preserve of the fixed territory of home and the occupant or owner of that dwelling, the flood transformed the home itself into a ‘situational’ territory (Goffman, 1971, p. 29) that allowed strangers to touch, and lay claim to a right to determine the status of, those items as salvageable or destined for the rubbish heap. Operating with a combined disposition of objectivity and detachment (Simmel, 1908/1950) and a certain level of self-ascribed autonomy, in many instances the volunteer-strangers determined these items as worthless and beyond repair, and they were quickly discarded. As McKinnon et al. (2016, p. 1130) have similarly observed, despite their good intentions, ‘the volunteers could not comprehend the true value of what simply appeared to be mud-ruined boxes of soggy books, photographs and documents’. But for their owners, they were invested with personal meaning, memory and attachment. Such was the extraordinariness of the situation – the flood, the influx of the strangers, the loss of control – that the will of owners did not necessarily prevail as might usually occur. Only in some instances were residents able to impose order onto the situation by positioning themselves in doorways to monitor the flow of items carried out to the rubbish heap. For others, this required negotiation with the stranger, or a last-resort rescue to remove precious items from the rubbish pile:

But the volunteers came the day after the flood – busloads of them – and they just took over and they were going through my kitchen and they were just throwing things on the floor and – or into a wheelbarrow and they were carting them out. I was nearly frantic, saying ‘no, no no, that was my grandmother’s’. ‘You can buy it at an Op Shop for $2’ [someone said]. I said ‘no, it was my mum’s; it’s Royal Doulton, it’s something’. And they said, ‘well you go out and stand on the heap and if you [want] pick anything off the heap’, but by the time it got out there it was just virtually broken. (Female, Suburb 3)

[Name of friend] was distressed at the time because people were chucking – they meant to help but they were chucking things out that she could have saved. (Female, Suburb 1)

I don’t even know what they threw out. … Oh well, never mind. We survived. (Female, Suburb 1)

As citizens and victims, residents often felt compelled to accept the intent of the Mud Army, but as homeowners, many resented this incursion into the private realm and the material and symbolic losses that it represented, not only of the personal possessions themselves but also of the memories and identities bound up in them (see McKinnon et al., 2016 for an explicit discussion of this in relation to the destruction of collective artefacts and memory). For those who were flooded, the stranger was a person who, joining with others, plunged into a situation where there was no expectation of immediate or ongoing reciprocity. The relationship between the volunteer-strangers and the flooded resident, whilst altruistic, was ‘all care, no responsibility’ whereby the Mud Army volunteers saw each home as a ‘task’, imposing practical or economic value rather than aesthetic or sentimental value onto residents’ possessions. Yet, while there are many more stories of material transgressions by the Mud Army, there was also an appreciation of the support provided by strangers and, with it, a discomfort arising from charity that cannot be repaid; the stranger by its very definition is someone who expects and receives, nothing in return.