The home of unhappiness
Collectively, Marrickville’s population would doubtless admit it has its fair share of faults. But the unhappiness capital of Australia? Surely there are other places doing it tougher?
Yet it was the finding that Marrickville was the unhappiest area in the country – according to Deakin University’s annual Australian Unity Wellbeing Index – which marked the starting point for a remarkable three-part series currently screening on ABC1, ‘Making Australia Happy’. Filmed earlier this year on location in Marrickville, the program gathered together eight local residents from varying backgrounds and age groups, with one unifying factor – for one reason or another, they were unhappy with their lives, and wanted to change that fact.
According to the program’s producer, Jennifer Cummins, Marrickville was ideal as a social laboratory – with income and employment levels hovering around the national average, and a diverse population representative of contemporary Australia, it stood to reason the results which emerged might be applicable across the country.
But there were a couple of extra drawcards which made Marrickville the perfect choice. “It’s a very good-looking place – it’s a fascinating suburb, and it looks terrific on camera,” Cummins said. “But in addition, we also wanted a suburb where there were good opportunities for people living in it. We didn’t want a suburb where everyone watching was going to say, ‘Oh, of course those people are unhappy – it’s a really miserable looking suburb’, or where the people were a million miles from transport and infrastructure. Fortunately, Marrickville isn’t any of those things – and in addition, it’s got a great Council who care about quality-of-life issues.”
The series tracks a number of impressive transformations, but perhaps one of the most interesting characters is Cade Buchanan, a 34-year-old TV program scheduler. Describing himself as moody, pessimistic and neurotic, with a boring job, the Cade we meet in the first episode is shy, with a penchant for awkwardness in social situations. But there is a flipside to Cade’s life – he is extremely creative, although he only feels comfortable displaying his creativity online, in an environment which makes it easy to retain anonymity. His journey throughout the series comes to a head in the final episode, where he presents a photography exposition at a gallery in The Rocks, pulling the installations together in just over a week.
“I’ve always tended to look on the negative side of things, but that said, finding inner contentment is something I’ve always aspired towards,” he said. “I’ve read a lot of books, seen a psychologist on-and-off – and so, when I saw the call-out for this, it seemed like exactly what I’d been looking for.”
Prior to his involvement in Making Australia Happy, Buchanan would find himself deflated by what most would consider irritations – missing a train, or a broken phone. Now, however, he looks at them as water off a duck’s back: “I have a much stronger, more positive way of thinking.”
The program seems to have struck a chord with people across the country. Remarkably, the website has proven more popular than any other ABC website in the brief time it has been online. “We now have almost 20,000 people who have registered and taken the ‘Happy 100’ test on the website, which is unheard of,” Cummins said. “We crashed the server twice; apparently, within five minutes of the first show finishing, we had 200,000 hits on the website!”
It all bodes well for further investigation into the science of happiness. “We may well do a follow-up on our Marrickville eight, and we’d love to do a second series!” Cummins said. “Optimism is, after all, a very good indicator of happiness…”
The final episode of ‘Making Australia Happy’ screens at 8.30pm on Monday, November 9, ABC1.
