My photo of the view from Pacific Street, late December 2025
I scrambled through hordes of sunbathers at Watson’s Bay in late December 2025 to find Christina Stead’s childhood home, known as ‘Boongarre or Stead House, at 14 Pacific St, Watson’s Bay. It’s an 1870s weatherboard house with a stunning view of the sea.
It has always been on my mental list of houses to visit, as I’ve read about it sporadically for at least a decade. When I made my way there – seemingly the only person in the neighbourhood not wearing a bikini – I was stunned to see that a major renovation is going on, obscuring the house entirely, at least from the perspective of Pacific Street.
Stead was born at Rockdale, Sydney and lived at Lydham Hall in Bexley. Olga Sedneva, has written about Stead’s ‘formation’ years in ‘Between the Lines. Behind the Doors’. She notes that Lydham Hall is the only place open to the public where the Steads, Christina, and the second family of her father, David George (1877–1957), lived.
From Graeme Kinross-Smith’s Australia’s Writers, page 210.
Watson’s Bay was the setting for Seven Poor Men of Sydney, For Love Alone and The Man Who Loved Children. Stead’s experiences in the house provided fodder for her characterisation of the Pollitt family in The Man Who Loved Children, though Sydney is transposed to Georgetown, USA.
Sam lives in a big rambling house with his suffering second wife Henny after his first wife died young, leaving him with a a daughter Louie. She spends a great deal of energy looking after her five half siblings and struggling to resist her father’s forceful and domineering personality.
Henny describes Sam as ‘the great I-Am’ ‘the Great Mouthpiece’ and ‘Mr Here-There and Everywhere’ while he sees himself as ‘Sam-the-Bold’ As Jonathan Franzen observes, he’s a ‘hyperkinetic lord of the family’s run-down house’ who insinuates himself into every pore of his children’s beings’.
In real life Christina’s mother died from a burst appendix while pregnant, leaving her with her father from the age of three. David and Ada Stead separated soon after moving to Watson Bay, therefore the period described in the novel was relatively short in reality (though the emotional experience may have felt longer) As Sedneva notes, they never got a divorce. David Stead married his lover Thistle Harris the same year as Ada died.
The long-running campaign to save the house has been tracked in the media, most recently by Susan Wyndham in the Sydney Morning Herald when a plaque was added to the footpath outside the back wall of the house.
The owners of 14 Pacific Street were absent from a ceremony, as they were in dispute with Woollhara Council. Wyndham notes that Hotelier Damien Reed and his wife Genevieve had bought the property for $8 million in 2013 from soccer star Mark Schwarzer, who gave up on controversial plans to demolish a non-original section, add a glass room, and excavate for a three-car garage, cinema and swimming pool.
After my own disappointing visit, I emailed the council about these renovations and I was informed that ‘a Development Application was lodged for this property in 2021 with consent granted in 2023 for partial demolition and alterations to the existing house, new swimming pool and landscaping works.’ The application and determination from the Land & Environment Court can be viewed on the Woollahra Council DA Tracker (the DA number is 520/2021)
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To my eye, the renovations seem very extensive and likely to dramatically transform the character of the house, but its real estate value (10 million +) has precluded its purchase by literary or community groups – in short, this site demonstrates the reasons why there are so few intact, public-facing literary properties in Sydney.
Siting Writers 