Selling Up For a Song

That’s quite a crowd for a spot just outside tiny Millicent, in southeastern South Australia—reason enough to stop and check it out. On the way over, several blokes sporting check shirts and unfashionable haircuts pass by carrying large pieces of what might be called junk, a strong clue that what’s going on in is a sale. Bingo! On closer inspection, it looks like a garage sale, but one participant won’t let that description stand. It’s a clearance sale, he explains. The owners of the four-hectare property we’re standing on sold up five weeks ago, and now, just before settlement, they’re clearing the decks. This is unlike any city garage sale: there are maybe 100 people here, a professional auctioneer is working the crowd, and a bunch of Lions Club members are cooking sausages.

No offer is too low. Sometimes there’s a bit of to-and-fro in the bidding, such as on a freezer chest that eventually fetches $620. But often any bid will do. A chair goes for a buck. A tarpaulin, a wheelbarrow, a birdcage, a garden sprayer and a chainsaw that doesn’t work each fetch a pittance—but for the owners, the point is they’re gone. Bidders have traveled as far as 25 km on the hunt for a bargain.

Watching it all is owner Zig Osis, who with wife Jennifer sold up as Step 1 of a “two-step retirement plan.” Empty nesters, they’re downsizing to a smaller place in Millicent, with a plan to sell that, too, in about seven years, buy a motor home and travel the country. As surprised as anyone that people would part with money for a lot of this stuff, Osis reckons he and Jennifer might clear a bit over $5,000 from the sale.

If Osis is calm, Jennifer’s the opposite. “I’m feeling very emotional,” she says. “Really tight in the chest.” It’s not parting with the junk that’s affecting her; more the realization that they’re about to leave their home of 10 years, a three-bedroom, open-plan house that Zig built himself in his spare time, with a little help from family and friends. “We lived in the shed for a year,” says Jennifer, who’ll miss the Sydney bluegum floorboards—secret-nailed—most of all. “But the new owners have promised not to carpet over them.” She’s sad, but looking ahead. “This,” she says, “is our sea change.”