croydon

In the roll call of places I have lived, I have left out one house—this house. I occupy it for eight and a half years before moving to Bendigo, and for eighteen months since returning from Bendigo.

When I buy it, it’s the last affordable house in Croydon. I watch the papers for months after signing the contract and not one place I can afford or would want to buy comes on the market. It’s a revamped 1920s weatherboard cottage sitting on a huge, odd-shaped, barren block, no driveway, no garden, no fence. Three units are to be constructed behind it in time.

The revamp is superficial; it almost rocks on its eighty year-old foundations. It’s painted white throughout, new but cheap carpets, a bathroom refitted with a second-hand vanity and impossibly narrow shower stall. 

By the time I move in—Friday 16 July 1999—it has a front fence, a surrounding fence, a drive has been laid and a path to the front door. Six months later I watch the units go up from my kitchen window. All three are investments and tenants move in. My daughter lives with me for a short time before life’s deeper water calls her away.

I don’t love my little house immediately but over the years I grow to love it dearly. It has character, and my lifetime’s accumulation of books and stuff add to its bohemian charm. I sweat the creation of a garden, hefting bluestones for borders, purloining old bricks from empty blocks where I walk the dogs, wheelbarrowing soil, sand, toppings, mulch and rocks.

I construct vegetable beds from sleepers, plant natives in the front yard to shield me from the road and the footpath, watch the hardenbergia grow up and become the back wall of the carport.

A few lovers come and go, a few jobs with the same employer in Ringwood. I supplement my road bike with a commuter, the Red Rocket. I ride to work each day on the Mullum Mullum trail, wending along the creek under the trees: no better way to start a working day. In the end I pedal everywhere in and around Croydon. The dud Subaru I hate gathers dust in the carport.

I shuffle furniture round the house for eight years till I get it just right. Then I leave. Leaving is a wrench. If not for a new job in Bendigo I would never leave.

Three and a half years later I return. The house is grubby, grimy, much of the garden gone. I sigh deeply and begin again.

Now my good woman and I own a house in Carnegie. In four months I will move into it. Some time in the further future my good woman will probably join me there. My Croydon house must be tenanted again. I dread that.

Rock on.