Alice Street: images & memories

The sale of the family home is not usually the chance for a creative exercise.

For Pippa Tandy, however, becoming the executor of the family estate after the death of her mother led her down a path that she had not expected.

With the old family home in Bellevue near the Perth airport needing to be sold, Tandy cleared out her parents’ belongings collected over a lifetime and kept only a camp bed.

Her plan was to spend a few weeks living alone in the house while the real estate agent went about the sale. But as the weeks turned into months Tandy decided to photograph her surroundings and to keep a diary of each day she spent there.

Finally, after six months, the house was sold and Tandy decided to turn her photographic record and diary entries into a book that would chronicle the experience. It is also a memoir about the life of her parents, artist Bernard Tandy and his wife Robin, who lived in Alice Street, Bellevue, for 30 years.

Pippa, one of five children, did not grow up in Alice Street because her parents bought the house after she had moved out as a young adult. But she remembers it as a hub for family celebrations and visits by grandchildren.

It is also the place where Bernard Tandy was brought back to after his death in a nursing home and before his burial and the place where Pippa nursed her dying mother with her sister Caitlin.

Alice Street: images and memories is a record of not only the Tandy family but of the house itself as part of the fabric of the once working-class suburb of Bellevue.

While living alone in the near-empty house Tandy continued to go to work at Curtin University by public transport, her camera always with her as she walked the the streets to bus and train stations.

Her diary entries record her impressions of the urban life around her and the curious experiences of living in a virtually empty house. “My parents bought the house cheap from a friend,” says Tandy. “Bernard was an artist and both he and my mother were pretty careless with money. At the time of my father’s death in 2003 they owed much more on the house than its original cost.

“But the house is the repository of many memories.” pp. 149 illusts First Edition #0620 Signed by Author