Karen Crofts recently sold her house in Merewether, after a delightful decade in the community raising her daughter and hosting creative workshops. Crofts is the director of the Hunter Writers Centre.
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Crofts' father is from Newcastle, but she was raised in Sydney.
"I went from inner-city Sydney to a property in the Dungog shire. I bought land to regenerate it. Life on the land was very hard. I could see that drought was going to come more and more, the extremes in temperature. That was eight years and a lot of work," Crofts says.
She lived in Dungog while also completing her Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle. After many train rides between the two, she decided live in Newcastle and found a house going to auction in Cooks Hill. The bank approved her loan, but Crofts was unfortunately outbid on the day of the auction.
Dismayed, she walked into would be her future Merewether home on the very same day. It, too, had gone in an auction, but the original bidder didn't have the funds. Crofts put the money down and moved in. She was lucky.
Crofts moved in when her daughter was four, and has particularly good memories of the older woman next door who was like an auntie to her.
"It's always wonderful when you're a single mum to have a woman older to you next door," she says.
The four-bedroom house has one bathroom and an extra toilet. It's nearly 100 years old in a heritage-listed precinct.
The dwelling has a weatherboard frame with hardwood floors.
All the doors are original, with Oregon timber.
In the late 1980s the owners at the time extended the dining room and kitchen, matching the materials flawlessly.
Later Crofts changed the cedar windows and door frames to brushed aluminum. She did some cornice extensions and put glass doors along the back wall to view the garden. She established a few trees in the back garden to go with the 60-year-old Frangipani.
Crofts isn't too into Feng Shui, but she does love the shape of the house.
"It's been the most beautiful house I've ever lived in. All the other houses were long and skinny. It's fantastic to live in a square house, with a corridor down the middle, I tell you it does something positive for your brain," she says.
While living in Merewether, Crofts taught workshops out of the Borders Bookstore until the GFC forced its closure. She then brought writers to her lounge room at first and then two years later they used the cabin as well. The big back room hosted many live readings with lots of coffees and teas.
"The cabin in the backyard that was built in a day. It was really great. It seated 15, the perfect size for a writing group. Some very wonderful stories and poems were heard in that cabin," she says. "I loved being able to use the house for creative arts."
She had the idea to make a creative hub after she moved in.
"I read this article in the paper about a bloke in Paris. Every Saturday night he opened his house to anybody and turned it into this wine bar. There was an aerial shot of all these people who would come to his house. I thought 'I so want to do this with my house!'
She told her girlfriend who lived on Cram Street about it.
"To this day I remember it, she went 'Karen, it's not Paris,'" Crofts says, laughing.
But Crofts created her own version. (She later realised she had 45 chairs in her house to accommodate everyone.) She still keeps in touch with most of the writers.
These days the Newcastle Art Gallery hosts the writing workshops, but who knows what poetry and prose are yet to come, inspired by the Merewether era.