Just imagine waiting three months, say, to hear about the attacks on the Twin Towers; just imagine trying to sell your Elizabeth Street house from a thirty word ad in the newspaper.

In 1963 I came to Melbourne from Tasmania, and something that struck me then was that everywhere I looked people appeared to be selling their houses, putting up big billboards on the fence to announce the fact. Such restlessness, such movings around. Of course the custom of the billboards has by now well and truly spread to Tasmania, but way back in the Dreamtime such display was pretty much unknown there. According to a report in The Weekend Australian April 27, 2002, no house sale in Tasmania would make it into the top one hundred houses in Australia, so the island state is still lagging behind. The most expensive house in the country, says the report in The Weekend Australian, is ‘Boomerang’ in Elizabeth Bay, having been bought for twenty-two million dollars. I am reminded of a recent report of a family with six children in Tasmania buying a house on the west coast for six thousand dollars – one thousand dollars per child, parents free. I imagine both houses, ‘Boomerang’ and the west coast wonder, had billboards out the front. Then again, maybe ‘Boomerang’ was above that kind of thing.

Because I will read just about anything you put in front of me, I used to stop and read the Melbourne boards, and I have more or less continued to do so, watching the prose going gradually downhill even as the claims for the properties have gathered momentum. And even more entertaining than the boards are the accounts of the houses in the press, longsince accompanied by coloured pictures. A picture is, as ever, worth a thousand words, and the words have gone to hell here. This probably doesn’t matter much. Something that strikes me about the pictures on newsprint is that they often have a soft dreamy look, sometimes enhanced by the colours being slightly out of register. I kind of like that.

Often built into the descriptions of the houses on the billboards are curious mis-spellings and misunderstandings. An apartment which is intended to be a sound investment is described as ‘The Rock of Gibraltra’ – the meaning is alarming enough, but the spelling is the truly eye-catching part. Of course people who are looking for big trouble will fall for a place that describes itself as ‘Pandora’s Box’. ‘Deceptively large’, whatever that means, is a common way of describing a tiny house, but even more intriguing is the simple term ‘deceptive’. These untrustworthy houses lurk in a location near you. And you’d have to wonder about the ‘kookaburraghs’ in your gumtree. A house in Canterbury (dress circle) had a board that said: ‘The Great Gatsby’ – perfect I suppose for someone who wants to lose the girl and get himself shot in his own fancy swimming pool. ‘Reminiscent of Gone With the Wind’ also strikes me as problematic. ‘French provincial’ and ‘faux gas fire’ in the one sentence? Nothing is white of course, it’s milk-white; and everything’s bathed and flooded (with sunlight, that is). Such verbs, such adjectives. And where are the buyers, fleeing the terrible eye of Archbishop Pell who will fall for a place that is ‘Perfect for Professional Couple or Avant-garde Single’?

What you need these days is a celebrity name to work into the copy. Like the sellers are the parents of Kylie Minogue, or possibly Michael Hutchence slept here (hello?). Whatever it takes to make the agent’s phone ring, whatever it takes. With truly dress circle properties the copy can be underplayed – it is so cool to be able to say that it’s a single-level house with six bedrooms, a pool, and a large garden. Then you throw in the fact that the house next door recently sold for eleven million, and the one across the street for six. If you are, say, a photographer, and you are selling your home-studio, you tell of how, in this very place, pictures of stars such as Jeff Kennett, Plugger Lockett, and Greg Norman were developed. The ghosts of Christmas past. Sport is the big seller in Melbourne, so if your dad played for Collingwood (or Melbourne, or whatever), and you are selling your house in Park Orchards (or wherever), the copy will talk about your dad. Or else there will be speculation that a minor German nobleman might have lived in the property in the late nineteenth century.

As with most things, the sellers of real estate are selling dreams, and it is their job to second guess the dreamer. Tall, smooth, confident men in dark suits, driving shiny cars, smelling of Ferrari Black and Eau Sauvage – they could be undertakers or gangsters – they are the hard-sell peddlers of fantasy. Nothing wrong with that. If they are good they can see you coming, read your mind, suss your heart, empty your bank account, sell you your dream. But to go all out, as one ad did, and invoke ‘A dream within a dream’ by Edgar Allen Poe seems to me to take the poor dreamer into very dark territory indeed.

Do you want to be walled up in the tower, buried alive? Whatever turns you on. ‘Come saviour the sounds of the sea’ with ‘well tendered gardens’ – with or without the English language. But I often think it wouldn’t hurt if the copywriter were to brush up on the meanings, the references, and the spellings, sometimes. Maybe the copywriters are having a laugh at the dreamer’s expense. Mind you, they do get your attention, and the aim is to get the phone to ring, not to pass the University entrance exam.

I am writing this at budget time in 2002 when the property market has peaked, and prices are falling. To generalise, it is also a time when baby boomers are selling the large suburban home and moving either to the city apartment or to the coast. Generation X is not so interested in acquiring the suburban houses, preferring lofts and other smart smaller properties close to the city. Some of these trends are summed up in a billboard headliner: ‘Loft in Space’ describing an inner city warehouse apartment development. Even more intriguing: ‘If you lived here, you’d be home by now.’ ‘Let there be light’ takes it all back to the beginning of the world, with the agents and developers in the role of Almighty God sorting out the chaos – and there is something to be said for that.

Out on the edge of suburbia there are always the delightful billboards of the lunatic fringe: ‘Gentlemen Start Your Nailguns’ speaks of a tract of bushland where the developer has a permit to put up units. He is inviting prospective buyers to participate in the building program. This suggests another class of gentlemen from those who might have been interested in that property ‘very contiguous to Flinders-street’. Comfortable and elegant it was – but now the question is: how contiguous might it be to the multi-million dollar mansion trying to ape the Alhambra or the Taj-Mahal – how close is it to the buyer’s dream? The answer has to be: close, very close. And somewhere in Marvellous Melbourne the phone rings.

END