Trenerry Residence, Moir Street, Smithfield

A Smaller Place in Smithfield

The Trenerry residence was Unit 3, 19 Moir Street, Smithfield, the brick unit that Ronald and Gwendolyn Trenerry bought in June 1991 and that remained Gwen's home through 2026. They moved there from the Housing Trust double unit in Elizabeth South where they had lived for twenty-three years, a house that had grown too big and too full of old arguments once their daughter, Denise, left for Perth the year before.

The unit was everything the Elizabeth South house was not: small, quiet and theirs. It had two bedrooms, a front lounge, a kitchen and meals area, one bathroom, a laundry off the back door, a single carport and a back garden just large enough for a clothesline and a shed. Gwen liked that it sat a few hundred metres from the railway station and within walking distance of the shops. Ron liked that the garden was a blank slate.

Settling In

They brought the furniture of a working household of the 1970s and saw no reason to replace it. The dusty rose and avocado floral curtains Gwen had chosen in Elizabeth South went up in the lounge and the main bedroom, with a lace curtain behind them at the front window. The heavy three-piece lounge suite went into the front room, with Gwen's armchair beside the window, where she could see the full length of the driveway. A walnut-veneer sideboard took the inner wall, and the wooden-cased television sat on a corner unit.

The second bedroom became Gwen's sewing room, with her treadle machine, a card table and plastic tubs of wool stacked to the ceiling. The studio portraits of the grandchildren that arrived from Perth each December went on the mantelpiece, and nothing else of Denise did. The kitchen held Gwen's mismatched mugs, a round biscuit tin that never stood empty and a china plate with a violet rim from her wedding set, which she used daily until it was webbed with fine cracks.

Ron spent his first summer there outside. He built a galvanised-iron shed against the back fence, poured a concrete slab under the clothesline and planted a Eureka lemon tree in the back corner. He filled the front bed with roses and set a ceramic garden gnome beside the concrete step, a gift from a workmate at Holden's. The lemon tree fruited for the first time in 1994 and never stopped. Gwen gave its lopsided, pink-flushed lemons away by the bagful to anyone who visited.

Ron's Years

The shed was Ron's. He kept his tools, his cigarettes and his Saturday beer there, a long-standing arrangement Gwen tolerated as she had in Elizabeth South, and he tinkered there most weekends. The hinge on its door squealed from the first year, and he never got round to oiling it.

His heart began to fail in his late fifties. After his early retirement from Holden's in 2001 he spent more and more of his time in the unit, at first in the shed and then increasingly in the lounge, breathless after the front steps and with a growing row of pill bottles on the kitchen windowsill. He died at the Lyell McEwin Hospital on 3rd September 2004. Gwen left the shed exactly as he had left it for several years, and then began, a little at a time, to use it for her own garden things.

Gwen Alone

After Ron's death the unit settled around Gwen's habits. Crochet spread across every surface: doilies on the sideboard, the coffee table and the television, antimacassars on the chairs and a pastel afghan folded over the back of the couch. Magazines stacked up on the ottoman. A small electric heater stood beneath the front window from May to September, and on cold mornings it was the only warm place in the unit. The air smelt of rose talcum powder over old carpet and damp.

The damp was a fact of life. The unit sat on the low side of its block, and water pooled against the western wall after heavy rain. A musty smell settled into the lounge and the back bedroom, the skirting boards swelled and a patch of mould returned to the bathroom ceiling every winter. Gwen fought it with moisture traps and open windows, and then mostly stopped fighting it.

Her front room was where the outside world came to her. Visitors from the Playford Ward came regularly, and for several years before 2018 Greta Smith and Evelyn Baker visited monthly as her visiting teachers, sitting in the spare chair and on the couch while Gwen served them too-sweet tea and scotch fingers from the tin. Gwen saw every visitor coming from her armchair long before they reached the door.

The Steps

The timber front steps up to the porch were the unit's long-running problem. By the late 2000s they flexed underfoot, and by the mid-2010s they creaked loudly enough to announce every arrival. The screen door scraped against its frame and had to be tugged hard to open. Ward members and neighbours offered more than once to fix both. Gwen refused every offer, understanding very well where accepting such help could lead.

In May 2018 she tripped over the brick edging of the front rose bed while bringing in the washing and opened a deep gash along her left shin. The wound took more than a year to heal, and for most of that time a community nurse came to the unit twice a week to dress it in the lounge. The steps, the edging and the screen door all stayed as they were.

The change came only after she fractured her hip in a fall in the kitchen in March 2022. When she came home after rehabilitation, it was on conditions. Grab rails went into the bathroom and beside the back door, a council home-help worker began coming twice a week, and a ward member's husband finally replaced the front steps with treated pine and a handrail. Gwen accepted it all with very poor grace and never mentioned the steps again.

The Unit in 2026

Through 2026 Gwen still lived alone at Unit 3, 19 Moir Street, at eighty. She walked with a stick, and her daughter telephoned on Sundays and visited each March. The lounge still held the 1970s curtains, the afghan and the heater beneath the window, and Gwen still kept watch from her armchair for anyone coming up the driveway.

The new steps had weathered to grey. The shed door still squealed, and Ron's lemon tree, by then taller than the shed, was still fruiting in the back corner, its lemons still leaving the unit by the bagful with anyone who called.