45 Hale Street, Townsville

The new owners did not change much of its outside appearance apart from giving it a 'cool' blue-and-white paint job.

 

The year was 1985. I had come back from my last posting in Greece. My Saudi boss, who was reluctant to see me go, had promised to let me continue my audit work from Australia, and so I bought this property on the edge of Townsville's CBD to be both office and home to me.

 

The inside has been quite stunningly renovated. The humble verandah has become an extension of the living-space.

 

I bought the place for something like $50,000-plus but the promised work never materialised and so I left, first for Sydney and sometime later back to Canberra from where I had started out twenty years ago.

I hung onto the place for some years as a rental property but the trouble with maintenance and defaulting tenants was just too much bother and so I sold it again in April 1998 for a mere $87,000 - hardly the sort of rags-to-riches story so often touted by real estate agents.

 

The front room, once meant to have been my office, is now a beautifully appointed lounge.

Behind the lounge is another sitting-room. Its feature is the silky-oak room divider, repainted a gleaming white.

The garden has the city skyline as its backdrop, illustrating how close this ideal 'city pad' is to Townsville's mall and CBD.

 

The property resold four more times since I sold it in 1998, the last time in 2021 for $495,000. It's listed as a $500-a-week rental in January 2024.

 

 

The improvements continued. For all the latest photos, click here.

 

Townsville's Castle Hill in the background

 

Another example of my mad life and the equally mad property market!