No doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time. Sometime in 2007–8 Michael Younes was looking for a development opportunity and felt he had found one at 5 Sutherland Road North Parramatta. For $689,000 Younes took over the property from previous owners David Borger and Paul Barber and applied for a demolition order that would allow him to replace the venerable suburban, bungalow-style house with what was variously described as 'a two-storey duplex', 'town houses' or 'a dual occupancy residence'.
Younes might have recognised that there were potential complications in the deal but these seemed to have been defused when the demolition order — the most vulnerable and perhaps controversial part of his program — was successful. Knocking buildings over had become in recent decades a highly fraught endeavour in all of Australia's capital and regional cities.
But, as Younes would discover, the devil was not so much in any particular detail of his plan as in certain events and characters which his seemingly straightforward developmental bid resurrected from the past. David Borger, for example, was no ordinary vendor.
Borger had been Mayor of Parramatta — the youngest in the council's history — from 1999 to 2007. He left local government to become the Labor member for the state seat of Granville and in that capacity served as a minister in the Rees and Keneally administrations.
Not only as a vendor but as a concerned, informed citizen, and Member of the NSW Parliament, Borger might have been expected to be very conscious of the cultural provenance of the property at 5 Sutherland Road and its claims to being worth preserving. It would not have been difficult for Borger to recognise that, when in 2003 he paid $600,100 for the house, he was dealing, as Younes would be some years later, with 'no ordinary vendor'.
The house was sold to him by the Benaud family. It had been in their possession for some 65 years and had been the boyhood home of Richie and John Benaud.
It was the house to which, for example, the boy Richie and his father, Lou, returned on Saturday 13 January 1940 after a day at the SCG where they saw Clarrie Grimmett dismiss, among others, Arthur Chipperfield and a young