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House Auction? or Garden Auction?

© Gay Klok

My daughter and her husband attended a house auction two weeks ago. The house was in need of that famous TLC - tender loving care, but the position was unique. The bottom garden gate opened onto a safe sandy beach, on the shores of the River Derwent, the river that divides our capital city, Hobart, into two sections. This beach was the beach where I spent all my early childhood playtime. This situation alone is not so rare in Tasmania, but the home was part of our most exclusive suburb and therefore, the price was too high for Michele and David to be the successful bidders.

Not only did my memory take me back to those carefree, happy days but the fact that the property was auctioned reminded me of the traumatic day, twenty-nine years ago, when Kees and I purchased our present town house and garden. Kees and I married in Canada and when we returned to Tasmania, we built a "ranch style" [this term we had learnt in Canada] home on a very steep block of land in a bush suburb of Hobart. This comfortable and labour-saving house gave us thirteen years of much happiness as we brought up our four children and created our first garden.

One day Kees said to me that he was tired of running the children around to the various sports arenas and birthday parties. The bus service was not very good to this suburb. As luck would have it, we were having dinner guests that night. One of our visitors was an old friend of mine who took a leading role in the restorations of old houses in Hobart. On hearing me speak of Kees's constant weekend duties, he said "Why don't you look at the Butler's old house? It is up for auction next week"

Next day, at lunch time, Kees said to me "I called and looked at the property Geoff was telling us about. I think you should come and look at it"

To my amazement it was the house that had the garden with the largest Macrocarpa hedge in Sandy Bay that I wrote about in my article:

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Yes! This was the golden medal hedge, the hedge par excellence, that the hedge climber gang of naughty children were awarded the most points for if we managed to get all along it without getting caught.