MOVING AGAIN

My only excuse for not posting recently is that we’ve been in the middle of the next (and last - at least for the next few years) relocation. That, and the fact that we still don’t have any internet. But in the scheme of all the things that might go wrong in such a move, no wifi along with an ant infestation and lots of bruises are the worst we’ve had to deal with.

The move from Loch St to Archibald St wasn’t quite as traumatic as our other recent moves. For one thing, half of our lives was still in boxes in the Loch St garage. Secondly, we gave ourselves a couple of weeks between getting the keys for Willagee and handing over the Claremont ones. This has given us time to install a fridge, buy a new induction top oven and get the house rewired to take the electrical load, have a handyman fix all the shelving in the built in robes and take out the gun cabinet (!), meet Abe the pool man and get a tutorial on how to look after our salt/chlorine heated (a little bit) pool, add some more powerpoints and TV aerial connections, have a new buffet delivered etc etc etc.

The big move was on Tuesday 30 April when all the furniture and boxes were relocated from Claremont. I’m typing this 7 days later having finally (sort of) set up my study. It will be weeks and weeks as we slowly unpack, work out where everything should go, and decide what new furniture we need. However, I was quite impressed by the fact that we got our beds sorted on Night 1 and had a comfortable sleep….mainly because we were exhausted. No oven at that point and we’d forgotten to bring over the microwave so it was off to the Hawker’s Cafe in Winthrop, a feeder suburb to Murdoch University with a high Chinese population and therefore associated cuisine choices.

So far, we have had some visitors, swum in the pool, met the neighbours, eaten DJ’s Banh Mi that everyone lines up for, visited the local podiatrist, seen the police in action, been warned about some of the locals (“I’m not a racist but you need to watch out for the Aboriginals….”) It’s rather ironic that people should complain about indigenous folk as the name of the suburb is a Noongar term for red ochre which would have been found in the surrounding wetlands.

It appears that we’ve moved into a suburb that has had a chequered aka Homeswest/social housing past. Wendy and Trevor, residents for 17 years at 104A Archibald, told us stories of drug dens across the road and they now have a sophisticated camera security set up. Chris and his partner at 108 Archibald have only been here for 11 years and told the story that people couldn’t get to their housewarming party because of all the cop cars raiding someone’s house nearby. But everyone assures us that the suburb is much better than it was. In other words, gentrification is underway. However, we’re rather pleased to see a mix of people and as Susan and I both agree that we need to build more social housing, it be hypocritical to want too much change. In fact, it turns out that a friend lives in a Homeswest block of units for Seniors just around the corner.

In other words, while we’ve still got a way to go, we are settled in and we’re just about to celebrate our first Willagee week by walking five minutes up the road to our local drinking/eating place called the Spanish word for swamp in honour of Willagee’s original environment: Pantano Bar.

PS The Dr Killer cocktail with rum, passionfruit slushy and watermelon syrup was sweet and cool. But I’d forgotten that South American cuisine of the yuko/plantain/maize style isn’t really my thing. Still, the bar was buzzing on a Wednesday night in the suburbs.