Home is where house search begins

Returning to your home country after nine years away is hard when property prices have skyrocketed.

Home is where search begins

Moving back home to Sydney with a baby and an English husband after 10 years overseas was never going to be a picnic. We would have plenty of picnics, I promised them both, and days at the beach and balmy nights under Southern Cross stars, but the journey home would be tough. No point sugar-coating it.

But after the journey back came the shock of re-entry: a domestic property market that had guzzled rocket fuel for the entire time I’d been away. If I’d left intending to lock myself out of the suburbs I was born into for all eternity, I could not have planned it better.

Not that the plan was to buy a house. As a card-carrying member of generation X, my plan was, of course, to move back in with my parents. From this plush base, with childcare on tap, we would leisurely find somewhere suitable to live.

Only Mum and Dad’s was a little crowded. They had downsized shortly before I’d left and my brother, being a card-carrying member of generation Y, had never left home. It’s hard to say if it was the fight over using up the hot water or the brawl over who finished the hummus, but it was soon obvious we didn’t all fit.

So I logged on to airbnb.com on Friday and was in a very nice flat up the road by Sunday. But I was fearful about our eroding savings because of the rental rate and the cost of sending half a shipping container of our belongings across the world. Which, by the way, was due to arrive soon.

Over Skype I breezily promised my husband (still in Britain working out his notice period) that I would find us an unfurnished property to settle down in “under Southern Cross skies etc”.

Aside from unfurnished, there were other imperatives. Our lodgings would need to:

• Have a barbecue. Beneath that Southern Cross sky on a summer’s night, I’m sitting in the back yard, surrounded by friends, seafood sizzling on the grill, beers floating in the Esky. Nothing was going to come between me and the cliches that had brought me home.

• Be close to work. One of the reasons we left Britain was my husband’s three-hour daily commute. I never got melodramatic about it but that’s roughly 720 hours of the first year of his child’s life spent on a train. Enough.

• Be close to my mum, who generously offered us childcare while we found a childcare waiting list to sit on indefinitely. My family has lived in Bondi since pre-hipster 1930. It was my childhood home when sewerage outfalls filled the ocean with shit and syringes hid in the sand. Now it was one of Australia’s most insanely expensive areas.

• Have space enough for my mother-in-law, who’d expeditiously booked her flight.

My husband arrived after I’d spent two weeks in the Airbnb flat. I still hadn’t found anywhere, but the flat downstairs was available for a short lease so we took it. Move No 3.

I love my home city. I wanted, desperately, for my husband to love it too. And I wanted, when they arrived, for my parents-in-law to know what was so important that I took their only son and granddaughter to the ends of the earth.

I’d left Australia nine years earlier with a rucksack and I was returning with a family. Like any place, in Sydney, where you live makes a big difference to your life. For the first time in a decade I wasn’t prepared to compromise.

For the next 12 weeks we scoured the suburbs. We looked at dark little flats with glorious views, sunlit pads atop skyscrapers, dives near the beach and a place that should have been condemned not for lease (though the off-street parking was good). We added $100 a week to our limit, then an extra $100.

And then we found it. On a bright August morning we carried our little girl into a terrace almost identical to the one we’d left behind in England. It was on a street that was wide and quiet. And we could afford the rent.

Three weeks later we sat on the front porch as the moving truck with all our worldly possessions pulled up and two cheerful and sweaty men brought our things into what we’ve decided counts as our first Australian home. Just as so many migrants and expats returning home have done before us, under them Southern Cross stars.

PS: Bonus — when my mother-in-law arrived a month later, she was pretty damn impressed.