Laurel Edwards and Troy Cassar-Daley linked by history to Bulimba Queenslander
The entertainment couple plan to spruce up their home in Brisbane’s riverside suburb of Bulimba.
The Brisbane riverside suburb of Bulimba has undergone a huge change over the past 50 years from a working class wharf town to one of the capital’s million-dollar prestige postcodes.
Popular radio presenter Laurel Edwards has seen this slow progression for herself, having grown up in a working class family through the 1960s and 1970s along the main thoroughfare of Lytton Road. Her grandfather, a local wharf worker, and her grandmother lived along Oxford Street long before it became the bustling bar and shopping strip it is today.
For more than 20 years, the 4KQ Breakfast radio presenter and her husband, country music legend Troy Cassar-Daley, have called one of the streets atop the suburb’s rolling hills home.
“We moved into a two-bedroom place just up the road before the boom. I always wanted a Queenslander so we moved here (a few houses up),” Edwards said.
“When this came up, I said to mum years ago, ‘Why didn’t you buy on the hill?’,” she said.
“She said, ‘in the 50s, no one wanted to face west. There was no city’.”
The 100-year-old Queenslander is split across three levels, with the main living spaces and master bedroom on the top level and the bedrooms of their children and two guest bedrooms in the middle.
The lower level was recently renovated into an open and bright entertainment space. The Hamptons styling featured through the home is accented by polished concrete floors and glass bi-fold doors to take advantage of the views of the CBD and mountains west of Brisbane.
One of the reasons Edwards was so set on buying the property 18 years ago was the presence of the old doors to the CBD Brisbane pub, the City View Hotel on Adelaide Street, which were connected to the downstairs level leading out to the side of the house. By chance, the venue was where Edwards had performed in her late-teens and early 20s. For her, it sealed the deal.
“I said to Troy it was a sign. We had to have it,” Edwards remembered.
Next to the doors is a set of seats rescued from Brisbane’s Festival Hall when it was demolished in 2003. Who knows? They may have been the chairs she stood on in 1977 when she saw Sherbet and The Ted Mulry Gang at the iconic CBD music venue.
Other members of the Edwards/Cassar-Daley clan are connected to the airwaves in their own way. Son Clay is also a radio presenter on Brisbane Indigenous station 98.9FM, while their daughter Jem is singing her way around the city.
While the house is filled with awards and testaments of achievements from each member of the family, some of Edwards’s prized possessions are mid-century pop-culture memorabilia.
“I love absolutely everything from my childhood, anything from the late 60s and 70s,” Edwards said.
You name it, Edwards probably has it in some form. From tin lunch boxes wrapped in images of Mickey Mouse and the gang and The Partridge Family to bubblegum covers sporting Mork and Mindy and ABBA. The collection gets larger once you include cereal box toys, view finders, stamps, coins and original Avon cosmetics bottles.
“These sort of things I just can’t get rid of it” she said.
But after a century of standing over the city, the couple have decided it is time to give their family home a refresh. In the coming months, the top floor will be gutted and remodelled to make it more open plan and functional. The country-style kitchen will be replaced and the entryway moved so that guests aren’t facing a bathroom as soon as they arrive.
But it is not all out with the old and in with new. The original plans to convert the sunroom and master bedroom into a larger space with a walk-in wardrobe were rejigged to save the large, handcrafted ceiling rose.
Edwards says the character of the home will stay intact, with the popular neighbourhood house colour of many which has come to be known as “Bulimba grey” nowhere in sight. Instead, the Hamptons look will be replaced with pops of the colour. Cassar-Daley and Clay have been painting up a storm, with boldly coloured pieces inspired by their Indigenous ancestry.
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