Comfortable and relaxed : furnishing the home and nation

This article, drawing on research into prized possessions amongst working- and lower middle-class households in the central western suburbs of greater Sydney, explores the ways in which homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience. This study was not about national identity, yet several things emerged from the research which warranted further speculation.¹ I noticed that icons and images of Australia pervaded the households under study, and yet this Australian-ness was rarely foregrounded in the discussions of how participants valued these objects. I could have assumed that national identification was not important, but something more profound seemed to be at work—the taken-for-grantedness of these objects seemed to require thinking about how the nation gets folded into the personal and the familial. Significantly, a language of comfort, of being ‘at ease’ with and through these objects, permeated the narratives that people offered and seemed to provoke the idea that in making themselves ‘at home’ in a specific, domestic space, these people also seemed to be making themselves ‘at home’ in a larger social space. Rather than focus on a concept of national identity, this article, speculating on the basis of some of the responses in the study, considers the ways a sense of well-being and the construction of personal and collective identities occurs within a ‘nationed’ environment, where nation forms a material backdrop to the functioning of everyday life and is thus ‘naturalized’. It should be added at this point that those interviewed came from apparently relatively stable and happy environments in well-provided households—there was no obvious evidence of severe family conflict or personal despair, even amongst those who had experienced relationship breakdown in the past.