Joyce and I arranged an inspection as soon as the house came onto the market – a wonderfully elegant, 1920s triple-fronted Art Deco brick number. The Agent guided us around the property knowledgeably, and as we wandered around, we realised we were both humming. We were falling under its spell.
The attention to detail: built-in robes, ceiling roses, intricate fretwork, picture rails, recent renovations that included an ensuite bathroom off our bedroom, internal painting, double glazing and reticulated hydronic heating. What was not to like? Outside was a slightly dishevelled garden, a space that only just hid what had been a well-planned outdoor area.
“Is there anything we should know about the house’s past?” Our query caught the agent slightly off guard – she mumbled something about a murder – sometime during the Depression. Our millennially-honed attitudes were not about to be put off – distant murders were of no concern to us. But it did enable us to negotiate 15% off the asking price.
Our insistence for more information faltered: as we said earlier, the house had already seduced us. We had vacant possession two months later and the first couple of weeks saw furniture distributed, boxes unpacked and quite a bit of time spent settling ourselves into our new home.
Joyce was the first to notice a couple of hairline cracks in the children’s bedroom walls. That probably explains the quite recent paint job. We were not unduly worried and accepted some movement in a hundred-year-old house. We kept an eye on the cracks. By year’s end they had continued to widen, now possibly 5 mm wide.
Becky was the next to notice something odd. Over breakfast, she gabbled about her toys, describing how they move, magically, swisho from the centre of her room to the wall; the cracked wall!
My camping headlight and I crawled under the house. I negotiated a small embankment, a box of floor tiles, a few lengths of timber and some old bricks. I inched my way forward towards the kid’s bedroom.
The first thing I saw were several huge steel girders stretching across the width of the house. I edged forward for a closer look and came within a whisker of falling into an abyss. The steel ran across a hole, maybe two metres across. My headlight couldn’t penetrate the blackness. I dropped a brick and counted to five before I heard the thump of it hitting the bottom!
What the hell? My mind raced around the possibilities. This was Ballarat, maybe a collapse into an old gold mine. Or a subsidence, a secret excavation. Were the girders secure? The wall cracks above suggested not! When were they installed?
Over the following weeks, I talked to the Council and the Mines Department. I read old Mine Rehabilitation reports, but could find no mention of the girder’s insertion. How could they have been put in secretly?
With a slightly guilty conscience, we went back onto the market. We didn’t lose too much on the resale!