‘‘Every teenage boy has a go at surfing at some point. That’s what makes you a local. It’s how long you’ve been out there, not how much money you’ve got.’’

For the billionth time I curse not being able to surf despite being in Merewether three years now. We’re at Customs House on a Newcastle Saturday night, holding schmiddies of Fat Yak and straining to make ourselves heard. It’s late. People outside yell at cabs.

‘‘It’s changing character,’’ says Adam, competing with Daft Punk.

‘‘The surf shacks are disappearing and not being replaced. The old houses used to have front yards and backyards that opened onto the street.’’

Now, he says, people buy a block and to extract maximum value, build right to the edge of it. No yard. No suburban beachside feel. They call it building ‘‘to the edge of the envelope’’.

The night ends and I forget Merewether, until a walk with my wife the next night. It’s dusk on the beach at John Parade and the twilight’s suddenly cold. Behind a silhouette row of concrete and glass, the sun drops away.

‘‘IT is changing.’’

Graeme Brownlow has been selling houses in Merewether for 32 years. His office at Walkom Real Estate smells like a display home. I feel like I’m costing money by sitting down.

‘‘It’s becoming pretty exclusive. Merewether and Bar Beach are usually the first two suburbs people mention when they come to our office and say they want somewhere to live.’’

He clicks through a slideshow of recent sales. There are pictures of sleek white walls, pebbled gardens, roofs that give the illusion of rust, cavernous garages and plunge pools. 

Like butter spread thinly over bread, the houses are squeezed to the edge of the block. But like butter spread thickly, they also reach for the sky. Most have double garages with living space stacked on top.

‘‘People just want to walk in and have it all there. It costs so much money to buy the damn thing in the first place,’’ says Brownlow. He’s talking about the land.

‘‘So yeah, the owner’s going to build on it as much as he can. The California bungalows and miners’ cottages are getting bulldozed.’’

The demise of the cottages began near the beach and is creeping inland. You can see it with your own eyes. But there’s something else I want to ask about.

Six years ago, Nathan Tinkler went on a spree and bought the house at No.1 Berner Street. He bought it from Andrew Johns.

While real estate agents disputed the figure bandied about, which ran to $4.3million, it’s safe to say Tinkler paid over the odds. The same can be said of the bigger place he bought at 4 Ocean Street, and the house next to that.

At the time, the knowledge the Tinklers were in town made every bald, fat man in Merewether suddenly a potential Nathan Tinkler. I could’ve sworn I saw him once at Swell cafe.

But his buy-up also gave rise to the theory of a ‘‘Tinkler effect’’. Word had it, Tinkler had artificially pricked the surface tension of the property market and given everyone a false idea of the value of their homes.

This, in turn, transformed ordinary families into the ‘‘nouveau riche’’, while others were forced to move out due to rising council rates. Disappointingly, Brownlow denies the Tinkler effect.

In his three decades in the job, he says there have been three mini-ages of soaring prices in Merewether. None are Tinkler-related.

‘‘In the ‘80s, two-bedroom units went from $50,000 to $80,000 in a short period of time,’’ he says.

‘‘Then in the 2000s, they went from $250,000 to $500,000 very quickly. Then the GFC hit.’’

The third and most severe price jump is happening now. 

As of January the median Merewether house price was $810,000, a climb of nearly 19 per cent in a year. Most of the interest Graeme gets right now is for properties between $900,000 and $1.3 million.

And the demand has risen, he says, in the last four months.

DEB Turvey wants me and her son Jim to be friends.

‘‘He’s your age,’’ she says, closing the screen door and handing me a glass of water.

‘‘And I can just see him coming home and saying ‘Mum, this is my mate Tim’.’’

When Turvey bought up in Merewether Street in 1989, she couldn’t believe how dirty it was. She and her then-husband moved the kids up the coast from Panania, near Bankstown, bought a miner’s cottage ‘‘full of ash and sand’’ for $110,000 and did it up. 

If that doesn’t sound cheap, it wasn’t. Remember Brownlow’s mini-age of price rises in the mid-80s? The Turveys moved in after that.

‘‘It was a lot more ramshackle then,’’ Turvey says.

‘‘There weren’t many trees, and a lot of TV aerials. It had a real barrenness about it.’’

We’re sitting on her porch looking at the two-storey brick houses across the street. To the left is a new BWS drive-through liquor stop, which is around the corner from an IGA. To the right is Townson Oval with its floodlights and peeling clubhouse, home to Merewether’s cricket and rugby teams.

This part of Merewether Street is divided by a grassy traffic island. Neighbours use it as a spot to set up tables for the street Christmas party.

‘‘There were industrial smells and our cars would be showered in black stuff,’’ Turvey recalls. 

‘‘I was really thinking of moving back to Sydney.’’

Her cottage is painted a shade darker than powder blue, with a white railing detailed with tulips and a white picket fence. A swing dangles from a frangipani tree, and the front stoop is etched with Deb Turvey’s name and the names of her kids: Bridgette and Jim.

Most of the houses in the street were once like this, many lived in by young surfer dudes. Scraping together enough for a sharehouse in Merewether was, and still is, a rite of passage. House parties would rage all night and escalate to bonfires, but the kids slowly turned to Turvey as a kind of mother figure. She’d tell them not to get too crazy, at least not to get electrocuted.

Gradually, the pollution haze lifted and then stopped completely when the BHP shut. The kids grew up. Now, invitations to the refurbished Burwood Hotel come Turvey’s way frequently, and neighbours stop to chat on the porch. She hears the waves crash at night.

‘‘You personally establish a relationship with the water,’’ she says.

‘‘YOU can’t say it’s good or bad,’’ Adam says, stubbornly, about where the place is headed.

‘‘I mean, how do you stop it?’’

Adam turns out to be kind of an expert on planning and architecture who, annoyingly, won’t be named in this story. So the least he can do is answer his own question. How do you stop a place changing?

‘‘I guess you’d have to snap-freeze the demographics of the whole suburb,’’ he says, after a while.

In other words, stop any one group getting richer, poorer, bigger or smaller. Impossible. But here’s a snapshot of now.

The last Census found Merewether residents were the Hunter’s richest, even taking into account the mining money in the Valley.

More than 1500 Merewether households earn upwards of $104,000 a year, and about a tenth of those bring in more than $260,000.

But it’s also home to lots who earn much less. Incredibly, Merewether squeezes into a list of the Hunter’s top 20 suburbs for households earning between a dollar and $10,399 a year.

GARY Ihnen has a rapid-fire way of speaking and a Millard caravan. Right now, both are hard to ignore.

‘‘You can get a caravan in there, see? And that’s the difference,’’ he says, waving a hand in the direction of his brick Janet Street house. The Millard peeks over the side gate.

‘‘These new places don’t have yards. Who needs a yard when you can put two houses on a block?’’

Gary and his wife Robin bought here in the ’70s, on a sunny hill with views of Kooragang in the distance. Houses in the street were going for less than $20,000.

It wasn’t a desirable place, then. With the new Garden City shopping centre and a mini-construction boom, there was more to like about Kotara.

Why, it was commonly asked, would you want one of those old houses in Merewether?

‘‘But if you were a tradesman you could work on a house like this,’’ says Ihnen. 

‘‘People then didn’t pull houses down. They renovated them. These so-called modern homes, there’s no character to them. Do you think they’ll be here in 50 years? I doubt it.’’

He’s referring to next door, a rubble-strewn site where two houses are taking shape. One, close to being built, sits cheek-to-jowel with Ihnen’s fence, and the distance between its gutter and that of its rear neighbour looks about the length of my torso. There are plans for the next house to be four storeys high.

For four years now, the development has gripped the street in an exhausting dispute. Ihnen, who strikes me as having the stomach for a fight, has become a spokesman for his neighbours in a couple of media stories. Some of them are elderly. One 92-year-old man has a well in his backyard left over from the days when the hill was a colliery.

‘‘You won’t see them here much longer,’’ says Ihnen, meaning the old people. ‘‘The kids won’t be able to buy here either.’’

Out the front, beside a port-a-loo, is a sign with an ABN number and the name of the developer.

‘‘Salah Bousaleh.’’

SALAH Bousaleh is a bandy-legged man with white hair and a strong handshake. He’s wearing shorts and a black polo shirt, and we’re knocking back coffees on Beaumont Street.

‘‘There are two kinds of people in Newcastle,’’ he says. 

‘‘The people who live in Merewether, and the people who want to.’’

Bousaleh is one of the former. A migrant from Lebanon, he moved his family from Manly to Merewether. He says he’s been to 120 countries, and this is his place.

‘‘To me, it’s land of milk and honey. I love it. Gary cannot compete with me in loving Merewether.’’

One of Bousaleh’s sons – a guy in his 20s who sits with us a while – says he, his brother and sisters feel a duty to make the most of being here.

‘‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch, you know that saying?’’ he says.

‘‘Well there is in Australia. It’s called the dole, and we’re not on it.’’

Bousaleh puts his investment in the area at $15 million – including the United service station at The Junction –  and says he paid about $1.5 million for the Janet Street land. 

He can see Ihnen’s point, he says, but for that money he wasn’t going to put something small on it.

‘‘We live in a material world. It’s no use whingeing. Some people want Merewether to stay the same, but tell them to look at Bondi. Why can it change and Merewether can’t?’’ Bousaleh says.

‘‘Bondi is the emblem of Australian surfing. What about Coogee? Waikiki? Why is Merewether different?’’

His phone rings. The tone is Que Sera, Sera.

FROM our place you can hear the roar on a Sunday night.

It pours from two pubs and fills our street. To the north is the Mary Ellen, close enough that on a still night, you can follow the beery conversations.

East is the Prince of Wales, with its wooden balcony that must groan as the shadows lengthen and bodies cram in. Cabs jostle in the mad junction below and people blunder through our street, between pubs or headed home. For a few weeks, one particular group made a habit of leaning on our brick letterbox eating McDonald’s. A McFlurry cup would be left on the kerb, and I’d watch its progress down the street from day to day. It’s the best place I’ve ever lived.

If you stay awake long enough the roar becomes the sea, nearer than you think beyond the rooftops. On summer nights at the Beach Hotel, retired Herald journalist Neil Jameson used to gaze at coal ships flickering on the horizon.

‘‘You’d wonder if the poor bastards could see the light, hear the band, smell the people packed in.’’

He’s lived here for three years, after long stints in neighbouring suburbs. But to talk to Jameson you get a sense of the place as religious experience, or at least an ideal of how life should be lived.

At boarding school, Jameson’s daydreams were of Merewether. The ridgelines of his Merewether were pocked with mineshafts, and you could cut across the suburb on your bike through a labyrinth of lanes between miners’ cottages.

‘‘This was a mining village, once upon a time,’’ he says.

But while he might wince at how the slick Merewether Surfhouse shot up without, he says, proper parking, or how by 10am the beachside crawls with strollers that cost more than some people’s cars, he denies the place has ripped away from its working class roots.

The theory in other parts of town – that it’s a coalface of social climbing, a borough for the boganaires – is, in a way, reverse snobbery.

For every bronze hero burning up Berner Street in a Heat singlet trying to fit in, get on, match up there’s a blue-rinsed, night-robed pensioner planning her Christmas lights in June.

For every Lorna Jane mum walking with a plastic bag behind a pomeranian, there’s a troop of silverbacks reminiscing about their mates at the surf club to the refrain ‘‘did he die, did he?’’

Sure, McMansions sprout here. But where don’t they?

‘‘You’ll still find more of the old miners’ cottages here than anywhere else. And people talk to each other,’’ barks Jameson.

‘‘Snobbery? F–– me. Ask the kids on skateboards.’’

JETT Jones, is 14 and on school holidays. He pulls up his board with a scrape and pulls out his earphones from beneath his beanie. 

We’re at the beach. He says he’s here ‘‘all the time, every second day’’.

‘‘It’s a great place,’’ he adds.

When I ask if he feels surrounded by money, or snobs, Jett frowns and looks over my shoulder.

‘‘Not really. That’s more up at Bar Beach.’’

Source: Newcastle Herald