INSIDER HG
AUSTRALIAN HOUSE & GARDEN | 77
The weed-covered block of land with a derelict building in inner Sydney
might have been an inauspicious starting point, but for the author and
her family it held the promise of great things to come.ON HOME
by Holly Throsby
W
hen I was eight my mum bought a falling-down
house in Birchgrove, in the inner west of
Sydney, with the intention of making it
liveable for us, our young cat and our ancient dog.
The thing Mum loved about it was that it looked over
the water in Mort Bay. She was captivated the first
time she walked through the gate. You could see across
to Balmain and watch the ferries go back and forth.
But after the purchase, Bell, an elderly acquaintance
who lived two kilometres away in Rozelle, took the
wind out of Mum’s sails.
“Oh yes, it looks over the water,” said Bell. “But
that’s dirty water there in Birchgrove. Horrible docks
and shipyards.”
Mum asked, “Bell, when was the
last time you went to Mort Bay?”.
And Bell replied, “Oh, well,
before the war”.
Dirty water or not, Bell would
have agreed that the house itself
was really not much to look at. It had been subdivided
into three separate and filthy flats, where three
depressed-looking tenants had been eking out an
existence. They all took their sweet time moving out,
too, but Mum was patient. We would go over to show
the house to our friends, and a sad lady in a tracksuit,
still there, would come out. Then, when they all did
finally shuffle off, they left a lot of their junk behind.
And the previous owner came by at the last minute and
stealthily removed the lovely original fireplace fromthe front room. Mum just said, “Oh, well” and made us
some spaghetti with pesto for dinner.
Mum made pesto a lot when I was little – it was my
favourite food. I formed a club with my best friend,
Jessie (whom I lost touch with forever ago), called the
Best Friends Forever Club. We had an Official Club
Food and it was pesto.
So imagine my delight when all the old tenants
finally moved out and the house was properly ours,
and I took my friends down to explore the bottom yard,
which was all dirt and old relics and completely
overgrown with... basil! Hooray! I couldn’t believe my
good fortune. I knew that basil was the main ingredient
of pesto and that basil was quite
expensive: $3 or $4 dollars a bunch,
even in those days. With this
incredible amount of basil
growing in our new yard, we could
make 10 jars of pesto for us, and
still set up a basil street stall to
make a tidy profit from the leftover bunches.
During those first few days, Mum spent a lot of time
in the derelict house with an architect friend, looking
over his ideas to make the whole thing into a proper
home, and I spent a lot of time looking out over the
dirty water from my field of basil, imagining how rich
I would be from the street stall.
I picked a bunch so Mum could make us pesto, and
presented it to her proudly. “We don’t need to buy basilPhotography by Yanni Kronenberg (portrait) & bauersyndication.com.au (basil).from the fruit shop anymore,” I said. >
‘Imagine my delight when
all the tenants moved out
of that house and it was
properly ours.’