Aaron Smyth Residence, Berriedale
27 Wallcrest Road, Berriedale, was a small cream-brick house built in the late 1960s on the upper slope of Wallcrest Road, well above the corner at the bottom of the hill. Rented by Aaron Smyth from 2016 after his divorce, it looked out over neighbouring rooftops towards the Derwent and was his home until August 2018, when he left without notice and its contents were cleared by the letting agent.
27 Wallcrest Road stood well up the hill, where the road steepened and curved away from the corner at the bottom, so that the houses near the junction were hidden from it by the bend and the slope. It was a small single-storey house of cream brick under a low-pitched tile roof, built in the late 1960s by a local builder as one of a short run of near-identical homes on that stretch of the street. A strip of buffalo grass and a waist-high brick fence separated it from the footpath, and a single carport ran down the side to a narrow backyard with a Hills hoist and a lemon tree that had long since stopped fruiting.
Inside it was plain and practical: two bedrooms, a combined lounge and kitchen with brown laminate benches, a bathroom with a pale green bath, and a back door onto a small paved patio. The heating was a single wood heater in the lounge that took most of a winter evening to warm the house. From the front windows there was a view across the neighbouring rooftops to a grey bend of the Derwent, though not down to the bottom of the hill. By 2016 the house was owned by the builder's daughter, who let it through an agency in Glenorchy and replaced nothing until it broke.
Aaron Smyth signed the lease in the winter of 2016, shortly after the end of his marriage, and lived there alone for a little over two years. He furnished it sparingly and kept it as tidy as a barracks. The second bedroom held bunk beds for his children, Bryn and Jackie, on their alternate weekends, along with a desk, his running gear and a bicycle hung from the ceiling on hooks. The neighbours knew him as the quiet man at number 27 who ran before dawn in all weathers and kept to himself.
He left in August 2018 without giving notice. The rent went unpaid for several weeks before the agency inspected the house and found it clean, furnished and apparently abandoned, with a half-empty fridge, a stack of split wood by the heater, and a calendar still turned to the month. After failed attempts to reach him, his remaining belongings were boxed, held for a time, and eventually collected by his mother, Linda. The house was re-let before the end of the year.
