I’m becoming strangely addicted to Google Street View. This picture is from outside our house in Ceduna, where we lived in 1992-93. Kathleen was conceived there

I doubt we’ll ever live on the foreshore anywhere ever again. I also doubt we’ll ever miss an opportunity again to buy a foreshore property for $130,000. Such is life.

I quite liked Ceduna. Being on the sea mitigates the heat of summer; there’s always a change to relieve the heat.

Juliet was less fond of the place.

We moved there soon after we were married. Juliet arrived from South Africa while I was working in Melbourne.

Although she came from a country town herself, she liked the city.

Ceduna was unlike anything she was used to. Some people say it’s similar to South Africa because of the climate and the blacks, but Juliet came from George on the coast, which has a mild climate and the people are mostly white or mixed race.

Anyhow, we flew into Ceduna in March when it was piping hot and dry. The company car was a small Hyundai with a broken door which the acting editor apologised for.

We had trouble finding a house and lived initially on a farm 30km out of town at Maltee.

It was only $60 a week to rent! Hard to believe today, but there was 10km of dirt road to get there and Juliet didn’t have a licence, so she was very isolated.

I worked as late as 2am on Tuesday nights and midnight on Monday, also hard to believe now. I got home on Wednesday afternoon and went straight to bed.

After a few months of commuting from Maltee, the house on O’Loughlin Terrace became available to rent. It was 50 metres from the office on Poynton Street.

We left because Juliet wanted to live in a bigger town and I wanted to advance my career.

I think now if we’d stayed there and bought the house we would have had just as good a life.

Reverting to Street View for a moment, our Melbourne house doesn’t show there. I read that Google is getting more complaints about houses that are missed than it’s getting about privacy issues.