Or maybe there was. By all accounts, Symond thought he’d won the lottery when, just six months after he bought the Alexandria cottage, he sold it for $15,500 to a builder from Ballina. It was Symond’s first house purchase, but not his first property foray in the then-slum neighbourhood in Sydney’s inner west.
As he recalls, during the late 1960s, he and fellow undergraduate John Cannon and other mates each bought a studio in a rundown block of apartments in Newtown. In the lift there was a sign that read: “Please do not urinate in the elevator”.
