Yass and Wee Jasper

A quick vacuum and tidy up of my things, and then out for the day before my landlady had her house open for inspection later in the morning. I ended up in Yass, a town directly north of the ACT, and went window shopping and generally had a look around.

Yass is not really far from Canberra and I gather a lot of people commute from there to work in Canberra. It took me about 30mins to get to Yass from the northern end of the ACT. So, commuting is quite a reasonable option. When I was in Melbourne I had a 10 or 15min car trip to the railway station, followed by a 45 or 50 minute train journey, and with the walk from the train to work my travelling time was always over an hour.

I found an antique shop in Yass. Oh what a beauty this was. It was jammed packed with stuff, and I had a fabulous time browsing. I’ve never seen such a place so chockablock packed with stuff. As I was walking into the store I heard a customer speaking to the storekeeper at the counter, “I can pay a few dollars to hold it.” I don’t know what he was purchasing, but it was the shopkeeper’s response that brought me to attention. “Don’t worry,” the shopkeeper said, “take it now and drop the money in when you can.” I couldn’t believe my ears. There are still some wonderful people around. Stuff like that renews my faith in the human race.

Back in the car, cruising around, I spotted a sign to Wee Jasper. I couldn’t resist. There was no way I could prevent myself from going to a place with a name like that. I had no idea in which direction it was, what, or where it was, but off I went. It took me along a narrow road through rural areas, with undulating hills. The wind was gently disturbing the grass in the fields, there was hardly any traffic, and it occurred to me that this is the sort of place I’d often wished to be when stuck in traffic in the city. The narrow road crossed the Murrumbidgee River and ended up at a general store, where I had lunch. There were a few other buildings, but it was a very small town. Wee Jasper boasts some caves, camping grounds, as well as walking tracks. I must get back there at some point.

A bonus to living in the ACT if you like to get out and about is that you are streets ahead of the folks in the larger cities. When I was living in Melbourne, Warrandyte was almost on the outskirts which means there was about a 20 minute drive through that area before you are starting to get into the less built up areas, but it takes about an hours drive on top of that to get what anyone might call the country. If I wanted to go south, I loved The Prom (still do), you have about an hour’s drive through busy city traffic before you get to the other side of town and the beginnings of getting anywhere. But my experience, living in this bush setting, a 10 minute drive puts you in the country, in 30 minutes you are in what seems like a remote rural setting, like Wee Jasper, a place of dreams for city workers.

Getting around

There was a Nissan EXA advertised for $150 in the newspaper. The turbocharger in my EXA needs to be replaced. And for that price I might be able to remove the turbo and throw the rest of the car away. Well, that was my idea in checking it out. There must have been a lot of interest as it had been sold by the time I got there. Anyway, it didn’t have a turbo. The turbo had been removed, extractors fitted, and the air inlet pipe that would normally have gone to the turbo went straight to the inlet manifold. Now that’s an interesting idea I could use if my turbo gets much worse. The car is beginning to put out some smoke when I decelerate, to say nothing of the noise that comes from the engine when the turbo kicks in under hard acceleration. It sounds terrible and I try to avoid it. Consequently, when I accelerate from traffic lights I do so gingerly. I doubt if too many other road users appreciate my sluggish driving habits.

It was a nice day so I spent the time driving around the Canberra suburbs, ending up on Mt Ainslie, and what a wonderful view can be had from there. I’m pleased to be able to get around Canberra okay. Though, you can’t go to anywhere unfamiliar without a street directory. In fact, I saw a couple of people walking in a quiet suburban street one evening after work, and one of them was carrying a street directory in their hand. There’s hardly a straight street in Canberra, and with so many no through roads, crescents, and curved roads it’s so easy to loose your way or sense of direction.

My landlady advised me she is having the house open for inspection on Sunday. I’ll have to clean my part of the house beforehand. She's selling her house privately; no agents for her. They do take hefty commissions. So, I'll be interested to see how things go. It's an idea I have been toying with. She has a very plain ‘for sale’ sign in the middle of the front garden, and when she has an 'open house' places a sign at the end of the street directing any passers by toward the house, and another sign on the footpath out the front. And then just waits for punters.

I found the car wrecking yards. They seem to congregate in the nearby NSW town of Queanbeyan. Canberra must be too good for this type of business. Anyway, none of them had any turbos available that were suitable for my car. I’ll keep my eyes open.

There is a sharp contrast between Queanbeyan and Canberra. It doesn’t take long to get used to Canberra’s clean and tidy appearance with few electricity power lines on the streets, no corner shops, and curved suburban streets that generally don’t go anywhere. Most other places, including Queanbeyan, are built in a rectangular street pattern, where there is often a corner shop, with ribbon shopping strips on the main roads as you get closer to town. On the other hand, Canberra tends to have clusters of shops grouped into tiny shopping precincts. I went into town for the first time; they mostly call it Civic. The centre of Canberra is very unlike most other CBDs. The majority of the shops seem to be built into a mall, though I must say, a very large mall. But when I say mall, I don’t mean like Rundle Mall or the Bourke Street Mall. Think about your local Westfield shopping centre mall, and then think much, much bigger. It took me ages to find a petrol station in Canberra. You’ll seldom see any on a main road, as in most other cities. Usually they are tucked away in the suburbs out of sight. It must be something to do with having a clean tidy image.

One of the most delightful things about getting around Canberra is the system of main roads. They generally all have 80km/hr speed limits, which is very different from other cities. Travelling from one suburb to the next is best done by getting to your nearest main road, zipping up to 80, and the road signing is good here, and then getting off at some side street near your destination. I used to drive a taxi and you could often cut through just about any suburban side street and find yourself bypassing almost as many traffic lights as you wished, but you can’t do this in Canberra because so many suburban streets are no through roads or loops that take you back to the same road you just left. Of course, the advantage of that is that most streets in Canberra are quiet and serene.

Just getting started

So far my house-mate has almost been invisible. In the last few days I haven’t seen a soul. She leaves for work early and I don’t see her in the evening. It’s as though I have rented a house for the cost of a room. This means things are a bit quieter than I expected, but there are no fights over who watches what on the telly.

There was a house in the next street to ours in Melbourne that was up for sale. I had a look at the photos of it on the web, and it seemed a tad run down; particularly the kitchen. S went to the open inspection and thought the place was much worse than the pictures showed. It’s good to have a look at the opposition; to help set the price. Don’t just rely on what real estate agents might say. They can be wildly wrong, either setting the price too high or low to suit their own ends.

The kitchen cabinets were pretty bad apparently, but looked mostly okay in the photographs. I wonder if they were touched up. So there’s a concern: how do you advertise your place, which includes photos as well as the description, that shows it off well but doesn’t exaggerate. In some ways the photographer needs to use a wide angle lens to capture everything that’s on offer, but sometimes when you get to a place thinking it was a certain size only to discover the reality is vastly different. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because everyone else does it. Do you do anything to get the punters coming around and risk them being disappointed, or do you adopt a more honest approach and show pictures that are as true as you can get them. I don’t know if there is an answer to that. No one is going to point out the flaws when selling, but I would err on the side of honesty in my descriptions.

Presentation is everything

I had a list emailed to me, of things to do before the house gets put on the market. Things were getting organised at home, and this was a list of stuff that that needed to be done.

• chop fire wood,


• fit a moulding to the laundry door frame,


• fit moulding to the cornice in the study, and spa room,


• secure the lattice on the front decking,


• dump our old dishwasher and fridge,


• tidy the garage and clean out the rubbish,


• organise a trip to the dump,


• paint the bedroom, bathroom, study and spare room,


• get the broken key out of the laundry lock,


• repair hole in the driveway bitumen,


• repair kitchen bench top, and


• decide on the furniture to sell or keep.

A thorough tidy up and clean out like we’ve never done before, that should probably been done years ago.

If you’re selling your car, you clean and polish it. It should sparkle. The punters should be able to see their face in the paintwork. There should not be a single spot of dirt on the windscreen. So, it should be the same when you are selling your house. Give the punters nothing to complain about. Make them go oh-ah when they see your house.

There was an experience when selling my house in Tasmania that is burned into my psyche. The house was on the market for ages and not selling. The whole thing was getting us down. The house had a mezzanine floor. So, it was kind of two storey, and because of that it had huge sloping steel roof. There was also under house parking, and it had huge foundations for all this to rest on. The garden was neat and the block was adjacent to a park, where peacocks strolled on occasion. Actually, this park was one of Launceston's nicer places to be. The roofline of the house was a dominant feature of the building. It was a colorbond steel roof but it was looking a bit jaded and dusty due to oxidation over the years, but it was sound. We wondered that because everything else had been spruced up, and because the roof was such a dominant feature of the building, that it too needed some attention.

You can buy car shampoo that’s a sort of soapy preparation that leaves a shiny waxed effect when it dries. We got some of this wash & wax, donned overalls, and with buckets of the preparation clambered onto the roof, slopped it onto the steel sheets, rubbed and polished off the old oxidised layer and wiped it dry and clean. I’m sure the neighbours must have thought we were nuts. It was a little dangerous, but the view from the rooftop of a two story house gave an entirely different perspective of the suburb that became a bonus to a tedious job. The next day that roof glistened like new. No kidding. And it may have been coincidence, who can say, but after the Saturday open inspection on the very next weekend the house sold.

It was time to work on our Melbourne house, and make it sparkle too, and the list of things to do was just beginning. The trouble is, I’m in Canberra and the house is in Melbourne.

Mt Stromlo observatory

I wanted to have a look at some real estate on the weekend, but did the touristy thing instead. I happened to be driving near the Mt Stromlo observatory, which is very close to the Canberra suburbs. So, I drove up to have a look.

I was particularly interested in this, having a passing interest in science and having lived in Warrandyte which is a known bushfire hotspot. Though, I didn’t know about the Warrandyte bushfire risk before I bought the property. The Warrandyte house was a nice property in a very pretty setting. It was irresistible. Anyway, I knew the observatories at Mt Stromlo had been hit by the fire. It was on the news Nationwide. So, it was with a sense of empathy as well as curiosity that I went up there to see the place.

Within about a week of moving into the house at Warrandyte, a bushfire broke out in the Pound Bend reserve, which is only a few kms from where we were. Fortunately the fire was controlled relatively quickly, and was a tiny fire by most standards, but the experience put the wind up me. Following that experience summer used to scare me and I was always on the look out for smoke on the horizon. This is something to consider when choosing a place to live. If you want to live in a leafy setting, you are living with a bushfire risk. If this concept is too stressful, live in a more insulated traditional suburb. Of course, you can always buy a big water pump, fire hose, and tank, to help fight the fire yourself. But what if you aren’t at home when the fire breaks out.

The observatory has been decimated. A few administration buildings remain, but rebuilding is changing the look of the place. So much was destroyed. The area must have looked like a bomb site with many of the buildings just husks of their original. Plaques have been placed against each, telling of what they used to be like and the purpose they had. Some observatories were quite old, and boasted of being the largest or the best of their type, in their day, and may have lost some of their edge through the years. But it’s still distressing. They would have been in use, providing service for researchers, students, and others.

This photograph is one of many from Coombs Photography; please spend some time looking at the others, and look here for more information, and this too is interesting. My eye caught sight of a lampshade that had melted into a weird stalactite. The heat must have been intense. One of the steel frames which supported a telescope’s mirrors or lenses had what appeared to be very thick steel supports forming part of the apparatus. These steel bars were twisted and bent as the heat had softened the once straight steel, and with the affect of gravity these hefty bars had drooped into a vertical position, with the rest of the telescope pointing skyward. What sort of inferno can soften metal allowing it to bend like putty? Sad as all this devastation was, as it can be replaced with a bit of cash, one thing that caught my attention was that the data archives, the observations that had been recorded during the service of one observatory over a period of about a century, had been stored on site and were lost to the fire. Some data may have been hand written, perhaps with a quill. Though, I expect much of this data would have been copied, computerised, by various researchers as the need arose, but now the notion of going back to the source is simply gone for ever. I felt a tear forming.

Sorry to go on about this but it really got to me. I was reading a CSIRO report about a year or so ago. Various people had related their experiences and opinions, and the thing that struck me at the time was the disorganisation and inefficiency in getting the right people into fighting the fire, when there was still time to do so. Two things that hindered fighting the fire struck me in particular. There were a number of bulldozers at the ready, to cut fire breaks. They weren’t used, or not used early enough, because they had not been washed after their last job. Washed. Do you like that? The resistance to using them centred on the risk of spreading weeds by seeds caught up in the mud and dirt on the machines from their previous work. Stuff the weeds, in my view. Spray the ground with zero after the fire, if necessary. It also seemed that fire trucks were not allowed into certain areas because the terrain and access was undetermined by officials. That’s a reasonable concern, but on some occasions the land owners were present, and despite their local knowledge their advice was ignored. That just doesn’t seem right.

A place to live

Up early on the weekend, packed the car ready for the move, and checked out of the motel; it’s funny how you can never repack things the way you had them before. When I arrived at my new home in Dunlop I found that a double bed had been put into the room. So, I’m unpacking my stuff, and was getting some sheets and blankets out to make up the bed when I discovered it already had been made up with matching sheets and pillow slips. There were also towels in the bathroom. Later I found a mat in the bathroom. I’m being fussed over. I felt quite touched.

S had been cleaning up the back yard at Warrandyte. She laid a new brick path in the veggie patch. There was a pile of old bricks that had the mortar chipped off them and they became pavers. She suggested we buy a new ute, pointing to the advantages of a reliable car and perhaps leasing it. I’ve never been impressed with new cars. I think used cars make much better deals any day.

Rental properties

I contacted the staff office at work saying I’d be out of the motel early. It turns out that I have to claim my removalist costs within 6 months from my starting date, but she did say there was flexibility regarding how I get the stuff shifted. I must keep a note of that.

I had a look at a bed-sitter after work. It was $160 pw advertised with polished floors (ie. no carpets) described as spacious (did they mean no bed) and partly furnished (it had a fridge, small table and chairs in the kitchen). It did have a lovely garden and was on a nice street.

I think I’ll definitely be moving into the place at Dunlop.

Boarding

One of my new work colleagues, on hearing that I didn’t have a permanent place to live suggested putting out a request via email at work. I did this and very quickly got in touch with someone. So, I took a drive out to the northern Canberra suburb of Dunlop to see what might be my new home. The young woman seemed pleasant, and seemed happy to have me. It was all very casual and informal; which kind of surprised me. Well, I was a stranger, after all. Of course, she pointed out the obvious, “Well, I know where you work.” So we agreed that I was to move in on the weekend. I was good for both of us. She had her house on the market and I moved in on the understanding that I might have to move out at short notice. It was a dicey arrangement, but there wasn’t much else for me to do. She had a very nice house, and that made the decision to stay so easy.

I took the car to a local repairer, and got it fixed. A new tyre did the trick. The suspension wasn’t about to fall off the car, after all. The problem turned out to be a tyre fault. Part of the steel belting that runs through the tyre’s construction had popped through the tread, or a fault in the tread had exposed it; one or the other or both. It’s a wonder the tyre remained inflated. Presumably, as the damage got worse it reduced the speed that I could drive. I can only guess that each time I stopped that car on the trip that I had stopped with the dodgy part of the tyre on the road surface, and out of view.

I was generally impressed that this repairer didn’t see me as some out of towner and soaked me for work not done. He also seemed to think the turbo might need some work, and a turbo repair job might be in the order of $1200. That would be a bill that I don’t need at the moment. The turbo had been noisy for some time, but I always drove carefully.

A great real estate web site

Canberra has a great web site for real estate. The AllHomes site has the ACT well and truly covered plus a few surrounding areas of NSW. This is a particularly good resource and I recommend you have a look at it.

There are a lot of rubbish sites on the web that are used for real eastate, and some are so annoying to use but you often don't have an alternative. In Melbourne I couldn’t find a decent web site that covered everything in the area I was looking in. Oh sure, there are web sites that list lots of properties, but the trouble is that with the sites I’ve used either their search engines don’t work properly or they have been designed to include a lot of unnecessary listings. For example, if you want to search for properties for sale, say, in Bayswater in Melbourne you would enter Bayswater in the search box. A reasonable request I would have thought. But these horrible web sites are likely to return a listing of properties including St Kilda or Queensland as well as Bayswater. With the AllHomes site, you select the suburb and it comes up with the listing, no more, no less. It also includes various maps that are excellent in locating properties that you’ve just got to see to believe.

Anyway, I spotted a couple of rental properties that looked good. I drove past them after work and there is some potential there. Next step: catch up with the elusive real estate agent and have a look inside.

Don't forget the important things

This is my first day at work, and thankfully everyone has been very welcoming. I met the staff office person I had been dealing with over the phone. She was a stickler for detail, and wanted to sight my degree before putting me on the payroll. I didn’t know where it was, except that it was in Melbourne, somewhere. You know, in one of those safe places that you forget as soon as you walk out the room. However, she softened, saying as my qualifications for the job were based on work experience rather than my area of study it would be unnecessary. My new boss was good to me, and having been new to Canberra herself had a lot of useful advice for me. She mentioned in regard to renting that LJ Hooker want a lot of cash up front for the bond and they have a multi page check list to go through. It sounded ominous.

Early days in Canberra

I had a motel room paid for by my employer, and the accommodation was fine. I had breakfast in a nearby shopping centre; Westfield Belconnen. These complexes seem to be the same everywhere you go. Inside the mall it was easy to forget that I was now in another state. It’s a pity the architects don’t have a bit more imagination, and vary the design from one to the next.

I bought myself a street directory and studied the real estate section of the local newspapers over breakfast. My first priority was to find a place to live; some rental accommodation. I couldn’t stay in the motel for long, as I was only funded for a short time. There were quite a few ads, but it’s difficult when you don’t know your way around. I got in touch with a few real estate agents, and soon discovered that Real Estate agents don’t help out much for renters, at least not in Canberra. This is probably related to the ratio of rentals properties and punters looking for them. Still, it’s early days yet. One thing I did forget to bring, not having rented for years, was that the real estate agents want references. I used to rent in Melbourne, and I could have got a reference from the agent who managed the property I rented. I didn’t give it a thought, which was a bit of an oversight.

Feeling lonely I rang home. There were a few bits and pieces I had advertised on ebay when I was in Melbourne. We used to have a ute that gradually fell apart. I got $50 for it on ebay. This car had so much rust in it that you could actually see through it in spots, and the engine had blown a gasket. So, the $50 was okay. We sold a dog kennel for $26. I suppose we could have left the kennel for the new owners of our house as it wouldn’t have been in the way, but having an old car in the driveway was definitely a problem. So getting some cash for it was okay.

Ebay is a funny thing to deal with. I also had an old cement mixer for sale. I bought it second hand for about $80 or so, about 10 or more years ago. It was a rough old machine when I bought it, but it worked. It needed new bearings when I bought it, but somehow it survived without any attention, and I made it do a lot of work. Anyway I put it up on ebay for $30 because I thought that was a fair price, and if that’s all I got for it I would be happy. So, I was surprised to see the bidding getting up to $50. Mixers must be hot items on ebay, but I was feeling embarrassed because it had seen better days, and the neighbour borrowed it at one point leaving it uncleaned; there was a fair amount of lumpy bits on the inside. (There’s a lesson - don't lend your stuff.) I put a note on my ebay ad advising the bidders to slow down, that the mixer wasn’t in pristine condition. I asked them to study the photograph, and I reemphasized the problems, but they kept bidding, and I sold it for $120.

On the road

Eventually everything came together. The car was packed to the brim with just enough room to squeeze behind the wheel. A kiss, a hug, a farewell, and off I went. It was both a sad and exciting experience.

I wanted to pack as much as possible to help lessen the load when the big move took place, and I might have had to set up house in an unfurnished flat for months. So, I included a blow-up mattress, card table, folding chairs, crockery and the like, along with my personal stuff. It was comfortable enough in the car, but I couldn’t push or tilt the seat back had I wanted to, and I could barely see out the rear vision mirror, and the passenger’s seat was full too. The fuel economy wouldn’t have been too great, and getting to the spare wheel would have been difficult should I have needed it.

The drive out of Melbourne was perfect. It was a fine day, and an easy trip on the freeway was just what I wanted particularly with the car so precariously loaded. Albury is the half-way point, almost. It’s a great feeling when you cross the state border. It feels like you are really beginning to get somewhere; a landmark of the miles travelled.

So what happened to the freeway? Why is it that the Victorian government can provide a top class highway from one end of the state to the other (Melbourne to Wodonga) and when you get into NSW you are hit with a mixture of freeway and second-rate roads? This is Australia’s number one highway and all the NSW government can do is build sections of freeway interspersed with narrow single lane roads. With the amount of traffic that highway carries, it is dangerous.

The countryside in NSW along the Hume Highway is fabulous. The sun was going down behind me and it brought out the textures in the landscape. The view was unforgettable, and I can still see it in my mind’s eye. I wished I knew where I had packed the camera. I would have taken a few photographs. It must have been about half an hour before sunset, the shadows were getting long and the light was fading, and suddenly a bumping vibration started from under the car. It was a heavy, regular, fast vibration that pushed the car from left to right slightly. Oh no, a puncture. It felt like one of the rear wheels because the steering was still light. Thankfully this occurred on the freeway section of the road, and I was able to pull to the side of the road without bothering other road users in any way.

So, I stopped, got out, and walked around the car. All the tyres were okay. That was odd. I looked under the car, but it was getting dark and I didn’t have a torch. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Everything seemed fine. I felt the tyres; they were warm but not hot. There was plenty of air in them. This was a mystery. There was nothing to do but get back in the car and go on. I took it easy, expecting something to fall off at any time, but there was no trouble. The car was running nicely. Perhaps one of the wheels had picked up something from the road that had stuck to one of the wheels, and now it was gone. Then just as I was beginning to relax, thump, it came back again. The car was trying to wobble all over the road. Is the suspension falling off, I wondered, and I immediately slowed down, and the vibration stopped. It was sensitive to speed. I thought I knew what it was; one of the wheel balance weights must have fallen off and the wheel was out of balance. Anyway, I stopped to have a look. As far as I could tell the wheel weights were all in place, and there was no sign of any weights missing, like a ‘clean’ spot on the wheel. It was almost dark now. I grabbed each of the wheels in turn at the top, and shook them as hard as I could. I was trying to feel for looseness. Everything seemed tight. Back into the car and I drove carefully. Everything was fine. I found that I could drive the car up to about 110km/hr and if the speed crept up too high the vibration started. Well that was an easy fix; watch the speed.

From then on the pleasure of the journey had gone. Whatever was wrong was getting worse. I couldn’t drive at 110 anymore, because the vibration started to kick in at 100km/hr, which was just fine because sections of the highway have a limit of 100 and that wouldn’t have bothered anyone else. As I took the turn off to Canberra at Yass I couldn’t drive any faster than 80, which would probably have been annoying for other road users. The highway is a narrow single lane road between Yass and Canberra, for most of the way, and there was me hogging the road. Luckily there wasn't much traffic.

There was one other thing that happened on this memorable trip. This little car had been in storage in a corner of the yard. The car had had a car cover over it for about a year or more. When I took the cover off and began to clean up the car, there were some little droppings over parts of the bonnet. I had also noticed that a few fibre pieces from under the bonnet had been ‘nibbled’ by something. I think a few little mice had been running around under the car cover and perhaps trying to set up home under the bonnet. We used to have chickens and a few ducks right next to where the car was parked, and if you have chooks you tend to have rodents. Anyway, although you wouldn’t call October a particularly cold month it gets chilly at night. So here I am on the highway with the sun going down, and the temperature dropping. So, what else do you do but turn on the heater, but all these little droppings I found on the bonnet when I took the car cover off must have only been part of it, and I suspect a bucket load of droppings had fallen into the heater vent that runs just in front of the windscreen. The smell that came out of the heater was nauseating. This stuff stinks in normal circumstances, but here was me plying hot air on it when I turned on the heater. It was switched off in a flash. Of course, the windscreen fogged up with no demister. So, on this beautifully clear, icy cold night, I drove with the window wide open. I finally reached my destination in one piece, but cold and weary.