Wednesday, January 09, 2008

1997 - time to move on "again"

while Carnarvon was an interesting place to live and work and we managed to take in the best of the region's tourism attractions - Mt Augustus, Exmouth and the NW Cape and west coast with its fantastic coral reef and other attractions, Coral Bay (and Marnie/Tony) and Shark Bay and Denham/Monkey Mia (and its dolphins) - the time had come to consider my career.

There appeared to be an opportunity for me to take over as the CEO of the Development Commission (although this was never tested) but I did not think i could stay in Carnarvon for a further 3-5 years which would have been required if I had of taken this role. So i applied for some jobs and I was fortunate enough to get employed by Woodside. I joined them on 7 July 1997 and worked initially on securing the government approvals for LNG 4 & 5. Sue and the girls came back a few weeks later and Sue got another position within the Government.

As it turned out my job was a god-send. It enabled us to come back to Perth and it was fundamentally better working for a company like this than staying in the Government. The opportunities and financial rewards offered were fantastic.

We moved into our old house (after the tenants did the bunk and i spent three weeks fixing it up). It didnt take us long to realise that it was going to be too small for us. The girls were both growing up and we needed more room.

We started looking at properties in the area (as well as anywhere around Perth within 5km of the city. After we had looked at 30-50 places I started to think we might have to build a new house, but land was not easy to come by. In her usual fashion, once she gets a bee in her bonnet, Sue went to work calling real estate agents. Again as fate would have it, she called an agent on the day he was going to talk to someone about a sub-division of a block off the back of their house and he asked if we wanted to come along.

We went - and as they say the rest is history - we bought the "block", holding it with a $5000 deposit. It took nearly 12 months for the block to actually be sub-divided but we made a tidy capital gain in that period. Once we had the block we built a new house.