Stormy day in Bondi

Yesterday I went to my last swimming class (it went well; I can now swim 500m non-stop without getting out of breath, and I can breathe while doing freestyle without coughing up a litre of brine, a length of kelp and a discarded six-pack holder). The class was a replacement for a cancelled class two weeks ago, when Bondi Icebergs had been closed because of THIS.

Maybe that photo looks no more than normally rough and stormy. But a couple of things to add context: the spray in the middle of the picture is blowing just short of 100ft into the air; it's blowing up at pretty much the point where I was standing when I took these photos; and the water was flowing to and from the beach at such speed that the few people who tried to paddle were being swept off their feet and along the beach like dead cows in a flood.

There were a handful of surfers out there, but they were just bobbing around trying not to get swept onto the rocks; no one was able to stand upright, although a friend who was at Bronte beach on the same day told me that its much cleaner waves were attracting lots of eastern suburbs surfies who were successfully standing and riding them.

Bondi does get some amazing storms from time to time. In John Birmingham's "biography" of Sydney, Leviathan, there's a description of an even scarier sea on a similarly blazing beautiful day; he also points out that Flat Rock itself, the resilient 235-tonne boulder sticking out of the surf in the above photo, was actually blown up onto the rock shelf in a particularly brutal storm in the early years of the 20th century.

Still not impressed? Well, the waves didn't just break against Flat Rock:

Our refugee story, part two

So we left you with us in the house, trying to digest the aftermath of a verbal assault by our neighbour's brother.

The first question was whether to wait for our real estate agents to get back to us before going to the police. The next question was where we were going to spend the night.

The second bit was relatively easy: we stayed at Althea's on the night and installed Jasper there, and then moved in with our friend Janine who had just had her own difficult time getting rid of a flatmate/tenant who wasn't paying her rent.

The first bit was more difficult. If we told the police, we'd immediately be escalating the situation with this guy who had given us to understand that we ought to be scared of him. In addition, there was a question mark about what the police would actually be able to do; an Apprehended Violence Order, similar to an Asbo, could be used, but that was assuming that we were actually able to get it from the courts. However, the confrontation meant that neither Kate nor I was particularly keen to remain in the house, especially as Kate would be working from home; she certainly wasn't going to feel comfortable being at home with the french windows open, or indeed going out into the garden if this guy was likely to be around. That meant that we were going to want to move out, and we would do well to lodge our complaint with the police as soon as possible.



So we went to Bondi police station and were dealt with by a genuinely helpful and professional police officer; she explained that we would need the guy's name to get an AVO, and that they would send round a police car to the house so that we could get our stuff and to try to get a name out of our neighbour. About halfway through the process of giving a statement, we had second thoughts about whether we wanted the police to go round there tonight, or whether we would wait till we could speak to the real estate agents the next morning before letting our neighbours on that we were onto them. But at that stage it was too late: the car was round there already.

When we got there after giving our statement we discovered that our misgivings about immediate police contact had been correct. The officer who had stopped round at our house had spent the past 20 minutes flirting with our neighbour and was now keen to get back to the station for his dinner; he'd already made up his mind that the situation was our fault and our neighbour was blameless. I spoke to him and our neighbour while Kate got some things together in the flat.

"Did you manage to get his name?" I asked the police officer.

"I hardly know him," our neighbour interjected.

"She said he was called Peter," he said, looking away from me.

"Don't you have a surname?"

"She doesn't know," he said.

"I've only met him a couple of times."

"What do you mean? He's your brother."

"No he isn't."

"Well your son described him as 'uncle' and he described you as his family."

"He described him as 'uncle' because that's how he describes older men. It's a mark of respect." (This could have been believable if they were indigenous, but the whole family were very white, very English)

At this point the police officer interjected to back her up. "You see?" he said.

I was feeling I wasn't likely to get anywhere with this cop.

"Why do you have a problem with her?" he asked.

"Because his brother was letting their Staffordshire bull terriers run around the garden and come into our house."

"Oh but those dogs wouldn't do any harm," she said. "One of them's about ten years old."

"So you don't know the guy's surname but you know how old his dog is?" I protested to the police officer.

He looked away again. "Why are you making such an issue of this?" he said.

"Because her brother threatened to set dogs on us."

The cop started looking away. "I've got to go now," he said.

"Well can you stay here until we've got our stuff?"

"I'm not here as your personal security guard," he answered sourly.

So that was that. We got the cat, headed to Althea's, and haven't slept there since. I've gone back a few times to collect things and the post. As we couldn't get a name for the guy, we couldn't file a proper AVO; we've subsequently got advice from friends that it's for the best that we didn't, as the whole situation can deteriorate and end up even worse when you do manage to get one. We've been in temporary refugee camp with our wonderful friend Janine for the past fortnight, and Jasper has been in a separate holding camp chez Althea. And after an agony of househunting, we're going to move into a new place on Tuesday. Yay!

Where guitars come from

I came across this while walking along one of the backstreets in Bondi. I don't think anything I say could really add to the strangeness and pleasure of the image.



God knows who put them there, but I'm glad they did.

Why the Sydney property market is like the French job market

The worst thing about the past few weeks of temporary homelessness has been the experience of being thrown back into the cold supercilious embrace of the Sydney rental market. Londoners like to think their city is in the grip of a unique property madness, only barely alleviated by the recession, but this survey last week indicated that Sydney is far worse - second worst in the world, in fact, after cuddly old Vancouver.

This feels intuitively right. At one property I was looking at in Bondi Junction a couple of weeks ago, the real estate agent was a veteran of one of the glitzier London estate agents' Sloane Square office. She moved here about six months ago, and said that the property market in Sydney 2010 is crazier than it was in Chelsea in 2008 - and I'd already said I wouldn't put in an application, so she wasn't saying this to get me all desperate.

You come up against the sharp end of this any time you go to look at property, whether to rent or to buy. The first thing you notice is that you can only view a place at a few, very limited showing times, when there will be (often literally) dozens of other interested parties tramping through the house. At one viewing of a fairly average property directly underneath the airport flightpath in Stanmore last week, there were more than 20 people milling testily about on the pavement before we were led in for the standard 15-minute viewing slot. A house-hunting friend told us that in Paddington she turned up at a property with a one-in, one-out policy, as if it was some sort of achingly trendy nightclub rather than a small and slightly shabby flat.

This situation is made worse by the fact that almost all viewings are on Saturdays between around 10am and 1pm. That makes hunting for a rental property require the sort of planning skills necessary to pull off, say, a major sporting event or a terrorist attack. First you select your potential properties, weeding out ones that are obviously rubbish and desperately trying to track down elusive letting agents for more details on the borderline cases (if you do get in touch with them - and it's harder than getting an audience withe the Pope - the agent invariably hasn't got a clue).

Then you get out Google Maps, plot their locations and work out which properties you can possibly make it between in the limited time available, bearing in mind that between 10.30 and 12.30 there will inevitably be one 'possible' viewing almost every 15 minutes, however much you've whittled down your list. Finally, you draw up a battle plan, get a car for the day and scream around all morning trying to hit your rolling 15-minute deadlines. The only thing making this process easier is that, occasionally, the letting agents don't even feel the need to turn up, so you can move on early to the next place having waited five minutes, called their mobile phone, and found it turned off.

I've not dipped my toe in the sales market yet, but this is, if anything, worse. In most of inner Sydney, auctions are the norm, with very high reserve prices, so that there is a relentless upward pressure on prices accentuated by the excitement of the auction process. Australian banks, for all their vaunted austerity, seem to be pretty lax with their lending practices, so there's a lot of unaffordable debt chasing each property.

I've been puzzling over just why this is so insane. One obvious point is supply and demand: there's clearly far, far more demand for properties in Sydney, especially in the inner-Sydney suburbs where people like me want to live, than there is supply to meet it.

Part of that is probably a result of Sydney's status as an international city with a pretty shoddy public transport system - people who have lived in Europe, Canada, and places like New York expect to live in suburbs where there is a bit of life within 20 minutes' walking distance, a corner shop and a cafe, maybe a school, and hopefully a decent bus route or train station that will allow you to commute to the city centre within an hour. Most of Sydney just isn't like that - this is a gross exaggeration, but such suburbs are pretty much only to be found between the harbour and the blue line on this map:

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=City+West+Link+Rd&daddr=-33.88937,151.147156+to:Canterbury+Rd+to:Thornley+St+to:Gannon+St+to:Princes+Hwy+to:Raglan+St+to:Raglan+St+to:Crescent+St+to:Anzac+Pde+to:Crana+Ave&geocode=FTkl-_0dP14CCQ%3B%3BFcqh-v0dlgQCCQ%3BFeZs-v0dHFECCQ%3BFSxZ-v0dNIQCCQ%3BFfps-v0dYqYCCQ%3BFQ7H-v0d8CEDCQ%3BFRTG-v0dgDcDCQ%3BFcrE-v0d1lQDCQ%3BFRpc-v0dLo4DCQ%3BFR4_-v0dxgkECQ&view=map&gl=au&hl=en&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=13&via=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9&sll=-33.880535,151.203117&sspn=0.116006,0.174923&ie=UTF8&ll=-33.880535,151.203117&spn=0.116006,0.174923&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Zoom out and you'll see what a small proportion of the metropolitan area that makes up. So you have a large population of relatively well-off cosmopolitan locals, migrants and remigrants all competing for property that answers lifestyle expectations that are far from the Australian norm.

That explains the demand side of it, but not the supply side. We've been looking for places across an area with about the same population as five London boroughs, and the simple fact is that there's been very few places on offer. This, I think, is why the Sydney property market is like the French job market.

When I first came to this city nearly eight years ago, I was very impressed with the levels of tenants' rights available. It was harder to be evicted, there were more controls over handling of your deposit, and in contrast to the typical London tenancy agreement - in which there are pages and pages of tenants' responsibilities, and two lines of landlords' - both parties' duties and rights seemed pretty evenly matched. In other words, it is a great place to be an incumbent. Once you're leasing a property, you have escaped the rental market rat race, you've got good rights, and your landlord is likely to find it possible but unduly complicated to move you on without good reason. As a result, people just don't move so much once they're renting a place.

Likewise with the French job market - once you've got a job, you are almost impossible to sack and the benefits come flowing in. As a result, French people don't leave their jobs often, and Sydneysiders don't leave their homes. The flip side of this is that househunting in Sydney is like being jobless in France - frustrating, fruitless and humiliating all at once.

Oh well. We've got a place now, so I'm part of the boss class and don't need to moan any more.

Visit to Canberra

Just in case the last post makes you think it's all been doom and gloom with us over the past few weeks, we also paid a visit to the wonderful Canberra the weekend before our neighbour trauma.

Canberra gets a bad rap among Australians, who see it as a boring  mix of roundabouts and Little Boxes-style dormitory suburbs. But those who live there are, if not fiercely loyal (Canberrans are rarely fierce by nature), then at least appreciative of its benefits: big city-style services and attractions in a small town-sized place, a relaxed pace of life, lots of nature and personal space all around, plenty of well-informed, intelligent people.

We visited a schoolfriend of Kate's who she'd last met around 15 years ago; on a blazing Canberra summer afternoon, we all headed down to the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia. It was a wonderful, peaceful time - especially compared to what happened the next day when we got back to Sydney.

Our refugee story, part one

It's been a while since I've posted because we've had a pretty terrible couple of weeks. The upshot of it is, we moved out of our place in North Bondi after being threatened by the brother of our upstairs neighbour, and we're going to be moving next week to a new place in Petersham, just north of my old stamping ground in Enmore.



All this started two Mondays ago, when I got word that there were some bookshelves in stock in Ikea way out in Concord, western Sydney, and hired a Ute to pick them up. As always with Ikea, however much you try to plan ahead something has to go wrong. In my case, although I'd stock-checked and location-plotted every item I was planning to pick up, I hadn't been counting on the fact that the cunning little brakes that stop the Ikea shopping trolleys rolling down angled travelators also kick into action when you load say five bookshelves onto the same trolley. So I spent a good bit of the afternoon trying to push an immovable trolley full of flatpacks around an underground carpark halfway up the Parramatta River, before finally loading it into a hired ute and driving it back to North Bondi, where the nearest parking space was 300m away.

Once I got back it became apparent that I wasn't the only one having a nightmare afternoon. Our neighbour diagonally above us had been testing our nerves for some time. She was a good example of the type that proliferates in Bondi in the summer and gives the suburb, and by extension Sydney, a bit of a bad name in Australia: orange spraytan, blonde hair extensions, surgically-attached stilettos, low-level alcoholism and a nose for a scrap. She found her seven- to eight-year old son a bit of a handful (fair enough), so sent him most days to play boisterously outside our flat instead (not so fair), where he would spend literally all day firing off a toy machine gun.

All that said, there was nothing in the situation at first to suggest we were going to have to move out. When we asked her to keep the machine-gun play to the far end of the garden she complied. We hadn't exactly made friends and privately she got on our nerves, but much of the time that's neighbours for you.



The problem came with her brother. He first came round just before Christmas, when I was out, and brought with him his pet Staffordshire bull terrier dog. I know that to their owners Staffies are lovely loyal creatures, but they're also responsible for one in six dog attacks in New South Wales. This one was being allowed to run around our garden unsupervised, which meant we didn't want to go out there and Jasper was left cowering indoors.  I think the conversation between him and Kate went something like this:

"You need to keep your dog under control."

"Calm down love, he's just having a run around."

"He's a fighting dog and he's running around unsupervised on shared property."

"Well we can hardly keep him in the flat all day, can we?"

"Fine, but if he comes into our shared garden he needs to be on a leash."

"What does it concern you anyway?"

"I don't want him attacking my cat."

"You need to calm down love, he's not going to attack anyone."

The guy was clearly a bit of a thug and equally clearly didn't intend to take instruction from anyone about what to do with his dog. But after that incident just before Christmas we didn't see him again until two weeks ago, while I was out at Ikea.

Kate first realised the dog was back when she heard our neighbour's son and a kid from the block next door calling out "miaow, miaow" into the house. They were standing on our balcony, at our french windows, with two Staffies, trying to entice Jasper to come outside. Jasper, sensible animal, was having none of it; Kate told them to get off the balcony (one of the kids protesting, "It's not my dog, it's my uncle's"); closed the french windows; and called our property manager to complain. He was off on holiday, but said he would look into it when he was back.

The next encounter was a few hours later, as I was unloading the Ikea flatpacks and trying to get them into the house. Kate was out the front of the block holding the security door open while I carried the flatpacks into the hallway of our flat; as I was moving the ute, the same guy came downstairs with his two Staffies, still unleashed, which promptly ran straight into our flat and started chasing Jasper again. Kate ran into the flat to flush them out; the man, helpfully, called out "That's gonna help" but otherwise pretty much ignored the situation as he sauntered casually out of the block.

When I got back in Kate had already gone upstairs to have words with our neighbour.

"Your friends' dogs have been into our house twice today. You've got to keep them under control."

Our neighbour clearly had her dander up and her her stilettoes were dug in. "You talked to my son today. Don't you ever talk to my son," she spat back.

"I told him to get off our balcony because he was taunting our cat with your brother's dogs."

"I don't care what the reason is, you don't ever talk to my son."

"But listen, you have got to keep your dog under control on shared property. It's in your contract."

"Oh yeah? Well we never had any problems here until you two moved in. If you want to make a problem we'll talk to the other neighbours and force you to get rid of your cat."

"You can't do that. We're allowed to have him here, he's on our lease. But those dogs aren't and you have to control them."

"Look I can't talk about this now, I need to bathe my son."

"OK fine, but let's make sure we talk about it later."

"Don't you ever speak to my son again," she said, and slammed the door.

So far so annoying, but nothing we'd move out over. I'm still moving furniture in and out of the flat; as I'm doing it, her brother comes past in a temper, calling out: "I'd help you if you weren't such a pair of pricks". He's hammering on his sister's door and eventually goes off round the back to knock on her french windows. We've barely got everything into the flat  when there comes an angry hammering on our own front door; I go to answer it.

This is the first time I've got a good look at him. He's probably a bit over six foot, with wolf-blue eyes and a nasty scar down one side of his nose. He's got short-cropped blonde hair and that ready-to-swing-a-punch stance you see on some blokes out on a Saturday night. Like our neighbour, he's British, with a bit of Essex or London in his accent. He is popping with anger.

"Don't you ever speak to my family again," he says as soon as the door's open.

"Hold on -"

"No, you let me finish," he says, jabbing a finger towards my chest. "If you ever speak to my family again, you'll be dealing with me."

He points to some sort of insignia on his beige collarless sweatshirt. It's a sort of black patch on the right shoulder - I have no idea what it was. "Do you know who you're dealing with here?" he adds. "If I ever hear from you again, you'll have a lot more than a few dogs coming round to your house."

It's our turn to close the door. We call our property manager and his colleague, and tell them that we'll be going to the police in half an hour. Then we sit and wait.

(to be continued...)

Change of door policy

We've had an eventful few weeks, hence the lack of postage of late. Anyway, the blog is back for the moment but some posts in future will be password-protected so that we're not washing too much of our dirty linen in public. Most of you should probably have already received the password from me - if you haven't drop me a line or comment on this post and I'll whip it out to you.