Real Estate and Property Market News

Events of 90 years ago weighed on Malcolm Donaldson’s mind when he was packing up his home at St Ives to downsize into an upmarket retirement village. It had been an attempt to rescue a drowning swimmer that ended in tragedy. In heavy surf in the summer of 1920, a young lieutenant-colonel dived into the frothy Palm Beach waters, hoping to drag a drowning woman to safety. Instead, he lost his life. The dead soldier, Douglas Gray Marks, was the uncle Donaldson never got to meet. Despite his death before Donaldson was born, Donaldson became the caretaker of Marks’s treasures. “He was a fellow who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front and he was the youngest lieutenant-colonel in the allied army at 22,” Donaldson says. “It’s quite an incredible story. When he dies at 24 in the surf trying to save a girl, he only had one lung because it has been shot out on the Western Front. “When the police went back to my grandmother and said my uncle had died in the surf, she said: ‘Well, I’ll never leave the house again.’ She was 48 then and she lived to 90. She never went outside again. “My mother was younger [and my grandmother] didn’t even go to my mother’s and father’s wedding.” Marks was highly awarded and received a Military Cross, a Serbian Order of the White Eagle – 3rd Class and Distinguished Service Order. Among the possessions Donaldson gifted to Sydney’s Mitchell library last month were Marks’s dispatches, photographs and a copy of his diary. The treasures were part of a host of possessions Malcolm and his wife Nancye had to sift through when they decided to move out of their home of 30 years. “I’m a great believer in memorabilia and I’d saved everything that moved,” Donaldson says. His wife, a textile artist and highly awarded community worker, had also accumulated a lifetime of valuables. Marks’s personal effects aside, the couple took a savage approach to culling their own things. “I got to the point I wouldn’t look; I’d just throw it away, otherwise I’d still be there going through it,” Donaldson says. However, at 75, the Donaldsons were ready to move from the historic St Ives home – built with convict bricks – where they had raised three children. “It was a hard decision, probably a decision that was easier for Nancye than I,” Donaldson says. “She was of the opinion, ‘Let’s do it before we’ve got to do it and let’s do it before the kids push us into doing it.”‘ Donaldson wasn’t that firm on the move but after three months of living at retirement village Waterbrook Greenwich, he’s delighted with the decision.