Ian Warden | The demolition monster licks its steely lips

There are now more than 250,000 homeless Australians. This columnist's Canberra is just revealed to have the nation's highest rate of long-term homelessness.

With homelessness so very much in the news it just so happens that the demolition of a perfectly decent house is going on just across the road from my study window.

The first bright yellow mechanical dinosaur has already taken its first banging, munching bites out of the empty home.

The brute went away after just half an hour of gnawings. Perhaps, having tasted the building and licking its steel lips in approval, it trundled off so as to go and alert its extended family to a good feed to be had at number 23 Nick Kyrgios Crescent (not its real address but one I've made up so as to protect the anonymity of privacy of my neighbours).

No doubt flat-out demolition and clearing away will begin soon to make way for a superior dwelling, more swaggering and manor-like than the shy working-class bungalow it replaces.

There is no NIMBYism about my sadness at the demolition. "Progress" is an ever-rolling stream and these gentrifications are inevitable.

I even entertain the shy hope that the new occupants of the new home may be colourful and outgoing people (perhaps radical lesbian Morris Dancers) who will impart some colour and movement to this hitherto dreary slab of suburbia. Bring them on, I say.

No, it is the knocking down and removal of a perfectly good existing home that always distresses.

There is something about it that feels tragic, wrong, unkind, even obscene. For homes have feelings. They have souls. Everyone knows this.

Sensitive poets have captured these truths. Here is a verse of Philip Larkin's Home Is So Sad:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

In another verse of the poem Larkin takes us on a short, sad tour of the empty home to say how it retains wistful memories of the people who once occupied it, of their pictures, the music they played on their piano, of their taste in ornaments.

Here, now, in unhappy Nick Kyrgios Crescent (not its real name) there are three empty homes, all of them bereft and withering because they have no one to please.

Here is an acute observation from Joyce Kilmer in her clunking but sincere poem The House with Nobody In It.

A house that has done what a house should do,

A house that has sheltered life,

That has put its loving wooden arms

Around a man and his wife,

A house that has echoed a baby's laugh,

And helped up his stumbling feet,

Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone,

That ever your eyes could meet.

And of course, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow points out in his Haunted Houses, ostensibly empty houses are not really empty at all.

All houses wherein men have lived and died

Are haunted houses. Through the open doors

The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,

With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

.... the illuminated hall

Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,

As silent as the pictures on the wall.

Under our system of brute capitalism these demolishings are irresistible. But they need not be done with such unfeeling, unChristian ruthlessness, and when I come to power the process will be softened and civilised.

The law will require that between the home's vacating and the onslaught of the yellow brutes there must be on-site a celebrant-led service of thanksgiving to honour the old home for what it has so generously done in its lifetime, for how it wrapped its loving brick or wood or fibro arms around the people who lived in it.

The service, a kind of funeral/celebration of a life will involve the reading of appropriate home-honouring poems and the playing and/or singing of appropriately hymn-like, home-honouring songs.

Lots of good folk will think Mahalia Jackson's heartfelt gospel version of Bless This House just the thing.