Dreams and nightmares

My rent was due and when that was paid I had $15 left in the bank. There’s a little petrol in the car, enough for a few carefully selected open inspections. I spotted a property at Chapman in which the write up seemed interesting. It was across the road from a couple of burnt out blocks with remnants of houses on them. The remains of Canberra’s bushfire.

This property was to be auctioned, and by the looks of the place would be miles too expensive for me. Just a short distance down the road was a very ordinary looking house advertised for $510,000. The property that was up for auction was very well finished by comparison. So I suspect it’ll go for something higher than that. We can have dreams.

While waiting for the agent to arrive, I walked onto one of the two ‘vacant’ blocks the bushfire had attacked. There was no sign of the inferno on the land, except for the fact that the driveway went nowhere, the level spots where the house used to be, and the empty swimming pool in the back yard. A few of the larger trees on the nature reserve at the back adjoining the block of land had clearly been ablaze, still showing charred trunks. It takes a long time to heal.

I felt a chill through my spine walking on this land, trying to imagine what it would have been like during the inferno. I have goose pimples on my arms while I write this just thinking about it.

There was a hell of a good view over Canberra from that block. My, oh my, was that a magnificent panorama.

I had a look at a few properties in Dunlop, that’s one of the newer northern Canberra suburbs. There are some very nice houses but generally on very small blocks which in turn have been covered with as much concrete paving as space for garden. I was shocked to see a property where the gutters seemed to be touching the neighbour’s house. There was a gap between the two brick walls of each building, but only barely wide enough to fit a broom. What a joke. How can builders get away with that? It’s not a design feature I’d be happy with.

I spent some time tidying up my new digs after my shift. I found some gold coins as I was going through my stuff; a few dollars of actual money. I’ll be able to buy some petrol and be able to get to work confidently. I’ll have enough cash until pay day. Isn’t this pathetic? If it wasn’t so serious it’d be funny.

Another real estate hunting weekend

There was a house for sale in Macgregor that I’d seen a week or so previously, and I returned for a second look with my camera in hand. I took a swag of photos for S to look at. She seems keener that me. Maybe I talk up the properties too much. Of course, that’s the trouble with me being in Canberra and her being in Melbourne.

It’s interesting what people will put up for sale. There was ducted air conditioning in the house, which would have been a bonus, but I noticed something on the outside of the house. There was what looked like an air return for the air conditioner in the hallway. Not sure. Some sort of vent. On the outside of the house, on a section of the wall near where this air return would have been positioned, there was a large discolouration in the brickwork. Condensation? I had an image of the brick cavity being full of water. Hardly likely, but air conditioners can develop condensation. It had me concerned. There was also some cracking of bricks running up from this area to a nearby window. It may have worried other punters too, so why didn’t they fix it. I find it difficult to work out why people leave things like that. Structural repairs can be expensive. Would you sell a car with a flat tyre or broken windscreen? Who knows, maybe that problem was one of the reasons the place was being sold; to get rid of their problems.

I also checked out the deep south of Canberra. Banks is one of the southern most suburbs of Canberra. I thought it was bit like Dunlop but with views, and boy, are some of those views spectacular. There seem to be a lot of new houses as well as building activity. There are a lot of large houses on small blocks in Banks, and a lot of them don’t have any style to them. Building houses without style seems to be an architectural trend I’ve noticed in recent years.

I had been passing a property in Banks that had an open-house sign out the front. So, why not just have a look; nothing to loose. It was a hot day, and the coolness of its air conditioned rooms was welcome. It wasn’t a property for me; far too large, but I had a pleasant chat while there. The very friendly real estate agent gave me the address of a house in Gordon, which is also in the south, and not too far away. We had a chat about Canberra weather. Her advice: get a house with central heating, saying that it can get into minus figures during winter in Canberra. And of course, as I am only too well aware it gets darn hot in summer. So, an air con too presumably.

I had a look at the Gordon house the agent had recommended. No one was living there so I peered in the windows and had a walk around the property, but my attention was taken by the view to the south west. The panorama of the ranges that was visible from the property was astounding. There are some beautiful vistas to be had in the northern side of Canberra, but none are a patch on the rugged majesty of southern districts. Being a bit closer to the hills makes a lot of difference.

Out and about

I took a drive to Bungendore. This is a little town to the east of Canberra just over the hills, past Queanbeyan, in NSW. What am I saying? Almost everything outside Canberra is in NSW.

Bungendore could be the land of red necks. Maybe it is. Anyway, it was flushed with quite a few tourists including myself who were mostly just ambling aimlessly through the wide streets. There are craft shops and restaurants in Bungendore. It’s definitely a town that’s trying to entice the tourist. It'd certainly be a town to worth a second look.

This is a picture of the main street and here are a few more of the town. The only thing that had any lasting affect on me was the discovery of a great little photo studio. Well, more accurately it was a photo gallery that sold nicely framed photographs. But these photographs were some of the best panoramas of Australian landscapes I’ve seen in a long time. Seeing this place made my day. Click here and spend some time looking at this guy’s stuff. I used to like to call myself a photographer, having made quite a hobby of it in the past. Michael Scott Lees has done wonders to support photography as an art form. His work is absolutely superb. Look for yourself. Don’t miss it.

I took a drive through Canberra’s northern suburbs. Some of them are very squashy. I find it ironic that this ‘bush capital’ is plonked in a place in Australia that, on the face of it is swimming in space, and yet so many properties in Canberra have very small block sizes.

If I get into my car I can be on the road for less than 10 minutes and be in the country on a highway driving though fields of pasture with cows grazing. There are many places in Canberra where you can drive for several kilometres at 80 or 100km/hr as you drive from one suburb to another (yes, within the city) and not see and single house as you go. In fact, if you look to the left or right as you go, you’d think you were 100s of miles away from anywhere. Canberra is designed with suburbs squashed into ‘islands’ that are linked by main roads that are surrounded by bushland. In its own way, this design is unique and it’s a pleasure to experience, but if one of the costs of this design is to force people to live closer to their neighbours than is comfortable than I think the design needs review.

It’s not uncommon to see houses in Canberra occupying the majority of the building block. I seem to recall a time, not so long ago, when most houses occupied less than half the land area of the plot. A consequence of the small block/large house syndrome is that there is almost no rear garden space, and at best a very small front garden space, and with narrowing streets some suburbs have a very claustrophobic feel to them. The rear of some of these properties are so small that rather than being a space for a garden it is really just a yard to store a few odds and ends. What happened to the quarter acre block, I wonder?

There are times when people need to get out of the house. If you have space in the back yard you might willingly sit and rest your bones under a tree, and if you expect value for your time in any kind of personal retreat you really need a space large enough that gives you the feeling of escape rather than being confined between the rubbish bin and the hot water heater as you sit on the back door step. This claustrophobia isn’t the same everywhere in Canberra, but I find it depressing to see houses built so close to each other that the guttering on the eaves is almost touching the guttering on the eaves of the neighbour’s house. (When I say almost touching, let me get specific: think the width of your finger. Not kidding.) For a ‘planned’ city, I don’t see much planning here.

I think there is something lacking in the architect’s plan when it includes modern and wonderful interiors but overlooks the areas outside. Though in fairness to the architect, perhaps it’s an issue of boosting the profits of the developer at the expense of the punters by trying to squeeze more blocks of land out of the one development. Architects and planners of Australia: get a grip – start correcting these mistakes.