By Les Pitt
The house prices and unavailability of cheap rental properties in Daylesford got me thinking about my past and my entry into home ownership. In 1967 I was a lowly clerk in a meat company near Richmond abattoirs earning $150 a week and living in a tiny shoebox of a house in someone’s backyard in Richmond. I was recently married, which was rocky from the start, but we were house hunting to get out of the shoebox and into something bigger.
We found a house in Curtain Street, Carlton, a double-storied terrace house which had small houses each side of it with adjoining walls that were against the terrace house. It was $6000, yes that’s right, I haven’t dropped any zeros, so we bought it. It was in a mess inside, every room had piles of cat food cans piled up. I’m not sure if it was for cats or humans. The notes they left behind were very strange, but I won’t go into that part of the story.
The house came with its own ghost which walked across the scallion roof at the rear of the two-storey part, then through a brick wall and across a wooden floor, then it would turn the doorknob in the room three times and then open and close the door three times. The house had a bad case of rising damp and the dunny was down the back yard. A renovators dream except I had never picked up a hammer in my life, which was surprising seeing my father and his father and my great grandfather had all been carpenters.
At this time I had two jobs, clerk by day and office cleaner at night. My territory was McIlwraith’s office and showroom in Richmond. I believe they were in hardware but this branch was white goods, stoves and fridges mainly. The showroom was full of stoves and being a bit of an idiot I used to set the timers on the stoves to go off at various times of the night. I thought it was funny but my co-workers didn’t – it scared the #%!* out of them. It was easy to get a second job back then and the big cleaning companies were always looking for workers. I would go there about 6.30 and get home at 8.30.
On one occasion, I arrived back in Curtain street to find I couldn’t park in front of my house as the street was lined for 50 metres with Harley Davidson motorbikes and when I entered my house I found that the front door lock had been smashed and the long passageway was lined with LP vinyl albums. What the hell! My wife filled me in on part of the story which involved Carol a woman from a few houses up the street. She lived with Don Ling, an architect, a very cool Chinese-Australian guy who rode a motorbike and had contacts in Hell’s Angels. I had never asked Don what his family history was as I wasn’t interested then where peoples’ grandfathers were buried, as I do these days so I never found out how he got here or what generation he was. He spoke well with one exception: a word with “th” in it – for instance “with” became “wiv”.
Don had come home to find his vinyl record collection had disappeared with Carol. He then went to Toto’s Pizzeria (in Lygon Street, the very first pizzeria in Melbourne) where he bumped into some of his Hells Angels mates and they came home to his place to smoke weed, drink beer and listen to music. Except there was no music, it was all in my hallway, so they came down, smashed the door and took the albums they wanted. I found out later they wanted to burn the house down but Don talked them out of it.
Later, I became good friends with Don and he told me what had happened. I had no idea that my wife and Carol had hashed out this plan for her to leave Don, and it quickly became a shambles. Within a year we sold the house but not before we were robbed. We got $7000 for it; my wife bought a Borgward TS Isabella and I kept the Austin 1800.
Fast forward 35 years, when I was temporarily living in Creswick, and a film was being made there starring Rob Lowe. I met Don again walking down the street in Creswick. He was a stunt driver in the film! After I moved to Daylesford he visited me on his shiny Harley Davidson and when I returned the visit to his house in Kew I found he had an old BMW bike restored and polished on a stand in his living room. He loved motorcycles.
Sorry, I’ve got a long way from house prices, I’ll get back on track and tell you about the prices here in Daylesford. In 1976 when I arrived every second shop in Vincent Street was empty and in Howe Street there was only Verey’s funeral parlour, later to become the Town View Milk Bar with Daffy and Sue running it. Friends of mine bought the six shops just up from the milk bar for $18,000. They were derelict and rundown and now seem to be thriving.
One of the locals said to me (I think it was John Wallace who started the concrete works). “If you can survive in Daylesford you can survive anywhere.”
Les Pitt has been a contributing member of the Daylesford and District Historical Society for over twenty-five years. He was awarded Honorary Life Membership of the Society last year.
Editor’s note: The Wombat Post publishes Writers Corner creative pieces. If you have a poem or a short story you would like us to consider, please send it to us.
