By Noel Towell
A high society dispute over a boat shed in the millionaires’ seaside playground of Portsea has underscored two important life lessons: beware of gentlemen’s agreements, and remember, Eddie McGuire usually comes out on top.
County Court judge Elizabeth Brimer has awarded legal possession of the shed on Shelley Beach, adjoining McGuire’s rented clifftop weekend home, “Shelley Roc”, to the TV star’s landlady, Ann Hyams.
The land on which the shed is built and part of a walkway leading to the structure were once part of neighbouring property Mileura, where Sir Stirling Moss dined before his 1958 Melbourne Grand Prix triumph – a delightful detail noted in Brimer’s judgment.
But in 1958, Mileura’s owner Alexander Davison granted his neighbour Walter Pisterman (Hyams’ father) permission to build the shed on the beach on Davison’s side of the boundary in what was termed a “gentlemen’s agreement”.
Eddie McGuire.Credit: Eddie Jim
Helen Blythe and her late husband, former Spotless boss Brian Blythe – whose daughter is Laura McLachlan, married to former AFL boss Gillon McLachlan – bought Mileura in 1991, gentlemen’s agreement and all, while Hyams had inherited Shelley Roc two years earlier.
Things got ugly in 2020 when Hyams tried to make her possession of the shed and land official by applying for “adverse possession” of the property, which prompted Blythe to have the locks to the property changed, in a bit of a headache for the former Collingwood president, who has been renting Shelley Roc since 2008.
Blythe also told McGuire’s landlady that her “licence” to occupy the disputed property was terminated, and the whole thing was soon off to the court.
But the judge decided last week that Hyams was indeed entitled to adverse possession of the shed and land after Shelley Roc’s various owners over the decades had enjoyed the property for much longer than the mandated 15 years, and with no formal lease or licence in place.
We gave McGuire, who is on friendly terms with the Blythe family, a shout to see if he wanted to talk boat sheds and property law, but he told us the matter was not his fight.
Fair enough, we suppose, but the men we’d really like to talk to – Pisterman and Davison – those gentlemanly neighbours from a bygone era, sadly can’t be reached.
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