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Late last year, here in Sydney Australia, driving home from Saturday morning grocery shopping, hubby took a “long cut” home due to traffic.In the suburb of Burwood, near us, there is a special street called “The Appian Way” which is a collective of very expensive, very grand Federation houses built in the 1920s. These houses when they ever so rarely sell, even without a view, sell for in excess of $5 million dollars each.
We took a drive through the Appian Way so I could look lovingly and longingly out the car window at these magnificent houses.
“Stop” I shout, there’s an “Auction today sign”. Deceased Estate House contents. “let go and have a look”.
Mainly I wanted to see the inside of one of these almost mythical houses.
Inside, the house was stunning and original but so so musty smelling and the contents, ugh, old lady stuff. Sure enough chatting to the Auction staff, the house had been literally locked up for 5 or more years as the old lady had been in a Nursing home prior to her death. The beneficiaries (adult kids living overseas) had already “been through the house and taken the good stuff” when Mrs got sent off to the nursing home. They apparently instructed the solicitors, in regards to what was left, to “put it in a skip and dump it at the rubbish tip”. Seeing as it costs money to hire a rubbish skip and money to dump rubbish the solicitors figured if they could get a few bucks for everything left via an on site auction, all the better and less to dump.
Stuff was being sold “room by room” contents. In one of the rooms, on the ancient single bed complete with 1960s chenille fringed bed spread was various boxes and piles of stuff, all from the inside of a 1960s timber wardrobe. Brand new towels, all yellow with age and still with price tags on them pre 1976 because that’s when Farmers dept store ceased trading, lace table clothes, lace dollies, old fashioned clothes and two old, falling apart cardboard boxes filled with lots of little tins (rusted shut) part of a vintage weighing scale (like those little round weight things), little tools of some description and various Bead necklaces including coral, some bags of raw gemstones (being turquoise and wee uncut sapphires and zircon) plus a few other broken Bead and pearl Necklaces. It also contained dead spiders and other insect remains! As I do craft work (I make doggie collar dangles which the greyhound rescue sells to raise funds for the cause) I thought I’d have it for the beads and pearls.
I found another similiar cardboard box (in a different room!) full of vintage jewellery display boxes in various states or repair and more rusty containers (the good gems) plus more insect carcasses. Then Hubby is telling me to hurry up “the ice cream is melting”. I hastily leave absentee bids on the two lots and head home.
I win both lots and go back the next day and pick them up.
The little tins, which I’ve been shaking (and no doubt “others” too at the auction) all have stuff inside but it’s really hard, like impossible, to get the lids off. So I’m spraying WD40 all over them out on the patio table.
After much effort prising the lid edges with a knife and twisting.... “Ohhh, they’ve got little crystals in them”. I open them all and have mound on the table. There’s bigger ones too from the other box. I decide to give them a rinse under water and figure they can all go into my Lalique Fish Tank (it’s a display container with Lalique fish ornaments looking like an aquarium but on the bottom instead of seeing the white plastic I’ve put all sorts of coloured crystals in the bottom to make it pretty).
So I am literally pouring the crystals in (from height), when one hits the bottom and bounces out. I pick it up and notice that it’s got an interesting cut. Might it be Citrine?
A few days later I’m back at the auction house (they do many different type auctions every week) and I’m chatting to a young lass on staff, who had been at the deceased estate house contents auction where I got my boxes.
Turns out that yes, poor Mrs was indeed in a nursing home for years. Her husband had died, heart attack, back in the nineties and all the kids live overseas. Basically they only came back to “get the loot, put her in a nursing home and leave”. They didn’t even take the Christening gowns (that were obviously theirs) that the dear old lady had so carefully saved. Wanted everything to go to the dump! The young lass was obviously affected by the callous disregard the kids had shown to their mother and the special items she had hung onto for years, no doubt wanting to “hand them down”.
I mused out loud “Well, the Mr must have had a good job to afford to buy an Appian Way house”. Oh yes she says, he was a fancy jeweller in the City, but he died suddenly. He had a workshop at the house, that room alongside the garage. Had a safe in it, and equipment but all that was cleared out years ago.
To be continued......
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