Blogs from the Wilderness

Friday 15th Jan 2010 – I send the following email to both Dillon and David King:

I have become concerned with the inability of my flatmates to get their bonds back. As travelers often have fairly low paid jobs $300 can be a quite substantial amount.

I have heard that you have been unable to return people’s bond to them as the landlord is out of the country, however as you are managing the property for the landlord and collecting the rent any agreement we have has been made with you. You therefore have the power to return people’s bond to them. As a absentee landlord myself I had to make sure that my tenants were able to get their bonds back. Also it has been brought to my attention that you are requiring people to give you their bank details in so you can transfer the bond to them electronically, considering we paid our bonds in cash and continue to pay the rent the same way, as requested, I don’t think that it is unreasonable that the bond is returned in the same manner.

Flora has mentioned to me that David is reviewing returning the bonds for some tenants because they didn’t stay for 3 months. This is the first I have heard of a 3 month minimum term. When I moved in we were told that the minimum term was two months, Joe explained that he wouldn’t be able to stay that long and Liam said that it wouldn’t be a problem.

As for people taking common property, there isn’t anything worth taking in the flat and as there is no inventory I don’t understand how that can be a problem.

I trust that we can overcome these issues amicably.

Monday 18th Jan – received a text from Dillon telling me to pay my rent.

Tuesday 19th Jan – I send Dillon a text saying ‘I’m waiting for a response to my email before I pay my rent’

Thursday 21st Jan – Liam shows people around and quotes prices lower than the current tenants are paying. So Nora sends a txt to Dillon asking if we will be paying the new rates. Dillon responds with text saying no you must continue to pay $170. A lively text debate ensures resulting in Dillon saying ‘You will get out in 5 days or you will be thrown out. And. My friend is moving in to your room once flora goes. So make sure your out. ive told him he can smoke and drink in the room.’

He then phones her to reinforce the message. After, he phones me and tells me that I have 5 days to get out as well. Saying that he is throwing everyone out for giving him shit.

Friday 22nd Jan – I phone the ‘tenancy tribunal’ and ask them about what I can do to protect myself from being thrown out. I phone a free legal service they explain to me that he can’t legally throw me out with less than 7 days notice. In the afternoon I get a phone call from Dillon, saying where is my rent – I tell him that as we are being kicked out I’m not going to pay it. Dillon responds with forget about 5 days I want you out today. He threatened to throw my stuff out into the street then and there, I was at work so didn’t want to argue the point but threatened to call the police. Dillon ranted a bit and finally hung up on me.

When I got home from work that evening I discover that all my clothes have been thrown onto the bed. So I fulfill my threat and phone the police. When they arrive a few hours later they basically tell me that there isn’t very much they can do. Dillon has denied touching anything of mine and blamed the cleaner, in spite of the fact that the cleaner hadn’t been around that day. In the end the police suggested that I leave, and keep the keys until they return the remainder of my bond.

Saturday 23rd Jan – After spending the night with Craig and Anna I move into a backpackers in Glebe, and contact Dillon about getting my bond back. Dillon surprises me by answering his phone, I suggest meeting at the police station as it is a safe neutral venue and he says he’ll phone me back. Obviously he doesn’t.

Monday 25th Jan – I receive the following email from David King.

Further to receiving notification of your vacation of the subject property, $150.00 will be transferred to your account on Friday 29 January 2010. Please send your bank details in order to undertake the remittance. I understand that Dillon was to meet you for this exchange but in light of recent disagreements, a bank transfer is more appropriate.

Naturally, to date I haven’t received my bond back.

The flat itself was quite nice; a two bed ground floor flat in a new block, there was a courtyard out the back where you could have a BBQ. The flat had a basement, as well as the two bedrooms, which was partitioned off into three separate rooms so that the flat could sleep eight people. There was no air-conditioning but that wasn’t surprising given the low cost of the room.
When I paid the deposit, we were given a business card for Dillon Roy giving us the impression that this was the company we were dealing with(the company in question was the Samadi Group). To begin with the landlord, Dillon Roy, appeared nice enough buying us a fan and a pan when we asked for it.

Then after nearly two months things changed; really it started before then, first, one of our flatmates, Liz, moved out and asked for her bond back. She was promised that it would be returned and she duly handed over her bank details. The bond was never returned and her emails and texts both to Dillon and the owner were ignored.

Next, my roommate, Joe, moved out. Again, he was promised his bond back by Dillon but again it wasn’t forthcoming. So Joe went to Dillon’s offices, the address on the business card was 54 Foveaux Street, just round the corner from where we were living. When he got there, Joe discovered that although there were offices registered to the Samadi Group, they were empty. Joe eventually got a response from Dillon, saying that the owner, one David King, was abroad and his bond would be returned when he came back. Again, once Joe moved out all his texts and emails were ignored.

At this point I was starting to take a serious interest in what was happening.
Next it was Julien’s turn and when he moved out he made sure that he had something in writing from the enigmatic David King stating when his bond would be paid to him. I received an email from him a week after it was supposed to have been paid and once again his attempts at contacting both Dillon and David King had been ignored, and as you can guess, his bond had not been paid.

Before I received the email from Julien (27th January 2010), a lot had already happened, which you shall read about next.

I discovered quite early on in my travels that the first people you tend to meet as a tourist or backpacker are the dodgy ones that want to rip you off.

This happened to me in Turkey, India and in Nepal (but not in Thailand, and in Nepal I was also helped out by two of the nicest guys I could hope to meet). As these were all countries where I could afford to be ripped off it didn’t matter too much and all three of these countries were places where you could negotiate prices, so being ripped off was often just a case of poor bargaining skills.

Similar has happened in Australia (and to be fair I know people who have had similar problems in England and America), when I first arrived I was warned not to go to the nearest corner shop because they tended to make up their prices.

Later I tried working as a door to door salesman selling roof insulation that the government is giving away free. Naturally a large number of companies sprang up as soon as the government announced the initiative, one of them happened to be owned by the owner of the hostel I was staying in at the time (Home Backpackers). The guy who managed the insulation company (Free Ceiling Insulations) day to day was a right little tea leaf, and a terrible liar, from the first day I knew that every time he opened his mouth I would be covered in bullshit.

After a week I realised just how bad I am at sales, I only managed to sign up two houses, but when I left at the end of the second week, I was only been paid for one of them.

Fortunately, not long after that, and just in time to avoid the mistake of trying my hand at business to business sales, I managed to find a real job working for CBA (Commonwealth Bank of Australia). So I was able to look for and move into a flat just before the hostel prices went up for the peak summer season.

A combination of laziness and lack of alternatives meant that my choice of flats wasn’t the best and I ended up somewhere with no contract and no receipt for my deposit. I knew that this would come back to bite me, and so it proved.

It’s supposed to be summer here, but that just means that it’s just hot and wet (as opposed to cold and wet summers in England).

Yep, that’s right, it was raining Christmas day, however in the run up to Christmas there was good weather so I went to the fish market to get some prawns for the BBQ and then when the day came round I fired up the BBQ at home and say outside to watch the rain (at least it kept the mosquitoes away.

Christmas eve was a good day, I went down to darling harbour and watched the fireworks. Sydney doesn’t have the over the top Christmas decorations extravaganza that you get in London where every shop over does the fake snow on the windows, but they do some great light shows and there are plenty of Christmas trees dotted around.

There are several buildings around the centre of Sydney where they have projected to highlight the facade.

I don’t usually use this blog to persuade people to do stuff, but I came across this by accident and am a little surprised it hasn’t had more publicity.

So vote earth, apparently it has a cool feature where you can see how many people in your country, city or postcode have voted as well. The tool has been adopted by the UN to demonstrate the depth & breadth of support for action.

The more people who vote for this, the more impressive it will be for world leaders and, hopefully, push them into more action.

This is also important for me as all the flying I have been doing in the last year has probably pushed my carbon footprint through the roof.

There were three of us travelling up to Bingara where we would be working on the farm (well working in a fairly loose sense of the word).

Day one was spend rounding up some horses so that the farmer could brand them and then trying out some horses ourselves, for the beginners there was a quick lesson in horse riding and then we were off trotting up the hills and through trees. We rounded up some more horses and took them back to the lower paddocks where there was still water. Finally there was a quick demonstration on how to crack a whip, which none of us could do, and then we got to try ourselves. By the end of the week one or two people had got the hang of it.

Day two we rounded up the nearer horses and rode to the neighbours farm where we helped the farmer (Steve) to drench and tag his baby calf’s (they were about 6 months old). After lunch we took a drive down to the neighbour’s farm where they were shearing sheep; we got there too late to shear any sheep but helped them pack up all the wool so they could load it onto a lorry.

Day three we mustered some cattle bringing them into the farm area and sorted out some of the more undernourished ones and the calf’s for extra feed and a spot of calf wrestling; I was absolutely useless at this. Once we had finished with that we herded the cattle back to their paddock and went out to fix a couple of fences and collect firewood for the bonfire we were to have in the evening. Mick, the farmers son, took us out to fix the fences and a water trough and while we were at it showed us a redback.

Day four once we had brought the horses into the yard we went out on the back of the ‘yut’ to bring in some horses that were on the neighbours land. After that we rode our horses to the other side of Johns land bring some horses back from there and search for a hole in the fence.

Day five was another day on the horses, first we needed to drive some cattle for the next farm as their water holes had dried up and they were becoming very weak. After lunch we took our horses down to the river for a swim and then it was back to the farm and it was time to pack up and head into Bingara for a night on the town.

Rosko recommends: the Jackaroo school is great fun but don’t expect to learn too much, mostly we followed the farmer and his helpers around and watched them do things.

Food of the stay: the RSL in Bingara does surprisingly good home cooked food.

From Canberra for no particular reason other than I didn’t want to go straight back to Sydney we headed for Melbourne again for a couple of weeks. I came down with a cold almost as soon as I got there so didn’t go out much until the last weekend when I went to see the penguin parade on Phillip Island.

The first part of the day involved feeding animals in an animal sanctuary, they had a Koala, and an emu (it wasn’t green and didn’t have an arm up its bum) some Kangaroos and a whole bunch of Wallabies, after that we went to a farm for demonstrations in sheep shearing and sheep dog trials, it wasn’t very interesting but we didn’t have to spend that long there. The next stop was on the other end of the island to have a look at the seals, I had mistakenly thought that we would be looking at the seals from somewhere above them in fact we had to see the seals on TV screens as they were on rocks half a mile out to sea.

Finally the penguin parade happened in the evening when just after the sun goes down the smallest penguins in world march up the beach in close formation in order to reach their homes in the grass past the beach. At one point a seagull too off scaring the little mites and they scattered in all directions. Once you have finished watching them parade up the beach you walk back past all the penguins standing by their front doors, you could imagine that they are Hobbits at home in the Shire.

Rocko recommends: the penguin parade, it’s fun to watch especially when the little penguins get scared, but you might want to skip the rest of the tour.

Canberra is the most bizarre city I have ever been to, it has everything you would expect a city to have except people and, naturally being Australia, public transport. Their natural history museum is fascinating and the Botanical gardens are full of Kangaroos, there is the most enormous park in the middle of the city and you can walk up there to a tower on top of the hill which gives you great views of the city and surrounding area.

Sadly though, some of the best things to do in Canberra are actually outside the city, for me at least visiting the NASA satellite tracking station would have been a great experience but I had no way of getting there.

Rosko recommends: Have a car if you go to Canberra, all the best things to do are outside the city, and the public transport is nonexistent.

Well not really Perisher, I stayed in Jindabye, which is a little village about 30min drive from Perisher and Thredbo, as the accommodation in Perisher itself is far too expensive, however once I had found some ski equipment I was able to spend a few days skiing. What I didn’t realise and nobody told me was that there are only 2 buses that go to and from the resort, and they both leave before 9 o’clock, once you miss them that’s it. The only other option is to hitch-hike, which isn’t the easiest thing to do carrying skis and boots. Fortunately I only had to wait ten minutes before someone stopped to pick me up.

Driving up to the resort I saw my first Kangaroo, plenty of them, but they were all dead by the side of the road.

There is nothing challenging about the runs in Perisher but they did have a couple of small kickers that I was able to try out. I spent 3 days skiing in and out of the trees, the snow was packed so it was easy to ski almost anywhere, after that it was on to Canberra.

Rosko recommends: Hitch hiking, I did this for two days, and then the 3rd day caught the bus, it ended up costing me a fortune.