"My personal trainer's come, my electricity is off and now I don't know what to do"

"My personal trainer's come, my electricity is off and now I don't know what to do"

“WHAT are you doing here?” a man in navy chinos and a white tucked-in polo yells.

He’s squinting out at me from the doorway of Point Piper’s Royal Motor Yacht Club.

It’s a beautiful building — pristine white with sandstone accents and two grand palms springing up on either side of the entrance. I’ve just stepped onto the concrete boundary of the fancy-looking Wunulla Rd premises — a few doors down from the $50 million mansion of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — when the man pushes the door open and calls to me.

After it’s made clear I’m not wanted here, I shriek and lumber back to my Honda.

Maybe it’s my Birkenstocks. Or the long-lens camera I’m holding. Perhaps he saw, heard and smelt my car pull up across the street. I imagine him peering out the window of the yacht club and gasping at its numerous scratch marks, obtained after years of parking wherever I like, legal or otherwise. I wonder what face he’d make if he ever found out the doors don’t lock anymore and the boot is tied closed with string.

Bruised by the assumption I don’t own a yacht, I set off down the road and begin nosing around rich people’s mansions in the wealthiest — and most expensive — suburb of Australia.

Point Piper is home to an eclectic set of people who all share the enviable trait of astronomical bank balances. Barristers, doctors, businessmen, moguls and — most recently — a swarm of Chinese investors.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, former Westfield chairman Frank Lowy and Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond all reside in waterfront enclaves. Tech billionaire Scott Farquhar bought the Fairfax family’s legendary Elaine estate for $71 million last April.

In the last Census, the median personal income of residents sat around $89,000 — about three times the national average of $34,000. (The figure is lowered by those who don’t work.) By comparison, as noted by The Australian this week, the “poorest suburb in Sydney” is Yennora — 27km away — where the median personal income is just $19,000.

Out the front of an under-construction waterfront mansion on this sunny afternoon, I ask a man with a mullet laying bricks what Point Piper is like.

“They’re all f***in’ snobs,” he growls, slapping down both a layer of wet cement and a long-held stereotype.

It’s stereotypes like this that Woollahra Mayor Peter Cavanagh doesn’t appreciate.

“The whole idea that Woollahra [the local government area Point Piper falls under] is an enclave of the rich where no one else can live is quite false,” he says. “To say that we’re full up and no one else can come is nonsense.”

There’s lots of construction going on around the 11 leafy streets that make up Point Piper, where the median house price is about $9.7 million. The old-money mansions that were once synonymous with the suburb are now neighbours to modern, multi-layered pads with lots of glass and concrete.

Regardless, it seems every room in every property has a view of Sydney Harbour. Even the Range Rovers and the Porches and the Mercedes and the Maseratis have million-dollar outlooks from their elevated waterfront garages.

“That one’s ridiculous,” another contractor says, pointing to a chunky lowset white home with gold accents and a thick, black, lacquered front door.

He’s just returned from China where the owners of this development sent him to assess whether the stone they want to use in their new million-dollar home is toxic. Getting cancer from their granite benchtops is a big concern of the wealthy, the contractor tells me. So residents pay big bucks to ensure their China-produced kitchen counters and bathroom tiles are pure. Why don’t they just buy the stone from somewhere else, like Italy, I ask.

“Because the richest people are also the tightest,” he whispers.

“See all these houses here?” he asks, pointing to the mansions that line Australia’s most expensive residential strip, Wolseley Rd. “The guys that own them own all the buildings over there.” He nods across the harbour to Sydney’s skyline.

‘THERE’S NOTHING HERE’

In place of Sydney’s iconic horizon and harbour — with its swooping bridge and soaring sails — are the graffitied walls that run alongside the train track through Yennora.

Located 27km away from Point Piper in Sydney’s west, it’s not that far. A bit over half a marathon. Some people run that for fun. The distance is short but the difference is stark.

Just hours after I visit the area, a 13-year-old-girl chatting with friends in the garage of a home in Constance St — only a few small streets away in Guildford — is shot in what police say is a targeted drive-by.

“It happens all the time ...” one resident told local media of the shooting.

Instead of grand Victorian heritage-listed homes are corrugated iron sheds — housing more car repair shops and scrap metal yards than what seems necessary for any single suburb. Given the previous description of my car, it seems I’m in the right place. The number of trucks and semi-trailers rolling down the wide, brown streets outnumber the tough-but-tamed Range Rovers barrelling through the delicate avenues of Point Piper.

It’s a heavily industrial area with commercial businesses exceeding the houses of the 1615 residents who call Yennora home. Driving through, the sheds gradually begin to fade into modest abodes. Some have been here for years. But not in the same way ones in Sydney’s east have. Still, a slice of land in Sydney is valuable — no matter how far it is from the harbour — and the median house price is about $750,000.

On Railway St, the houses look out onto the train line. A guy in his 20s, a spray painter, moved to this street last year. Asked what brought him here, he replies: “Just the way it is.”

I ask what he gets up to when he’s not working. He shrugs.

“Go for a walk. There’s nothing here.”

Apart from the car repair garages and houses, there isn’t much else. Ten minutes away, on the busy main road through the neighbouring suburbs, giant complexes sprawl: Bing Lee, Autobarn, Bunnings, McDonald’s. Across the border, in Fairfield East, there’s a strip of stores.

The Yennora Oasis Hotel, on the Fairfield border, does a refreshing gin and tonic but Justin Hemmes won’t be giving it the Merivale treatment any time soon.

On a corner as you drive into the suburb, the Yennora Kiosk sits across the road from some factories. I order the chicken schnitzel, lettuce, and mayo roll — spruiked outside on the specials board for $6.50. Behind the counter, a small photo of Home & Away actor Ada Nicodemou is taped to the wall. It looks like a magazine advertisement from her 2006 Gold Logie campaign.

“Do you know her?” I ask Tina, the owner. “She’s a friend of mine,” she replies.

Hassan Houda, who has run the general store Mr Fahitta’s on the Old Guildford border for 12 years, was once a Yennora resident. He now lives in the nearby suburb of Villawood — known nationally in the news for Villawood Detention Centre.

“I felt safer here [in Yennora]. I could sleep at night. Everyone knows everyone,” he says as his kids and relatives play on the floor around the cardboard boxes of produce.

Fairfield City Council, which Yennora falls under, claims the 27 suburbs that make up the area are the most disadvantaged in Sydney. A number of shootings and a gang war in Fairfield two years ago saw the area dubbed “Australia’s most dangerous suburb”. Nearby suburbs Auburn, Guildford, Merrylands and Granville are among the 10 Sydney suburbs with the most gun violence.

But the dangers felt in surrounding areas don’t seem to be felt by some locals in the mixed industrial-residential streets of Yennora.

“I’ve been here all my life. My mum grew up here. I grew up here. It was awesome,” grins Holly Moran, the owner of a local cleaning business. “The area was big for kids drag racing. A lot of people from overseas came to settle here. A lot of Syrian refugees. It’s a very old-fashioned area. Everyone says hello to each other.”

‘THERE ARE DARK STORIES’

“It’s discreet. There’s no local activity,” an elderly man who has lived in his waterfront Wolseley Rd property since the ’80s tells me. He doesn’t want to share his name.

“There are a lot of big egos around this area,” he warns.

Most people in Point Piper maintain private lives and keep neighbourhood interaction to a minimum. The old man says neighbours tend to get to know each other over legal disputes rather than Sunday barbecues.

“They get ridiculous,” he says of the battles. “Each neighbour has a lot of money and an even bigger ego, so they go on.

“[The area] has always had the extremely wealthy. It has the judges but it also has the people who are on the wrong side of the law — Medich used to live up the road.”

Millionaire property developer Ron Medich this week became Australia’s wealthiest convicted killer after being found guilty of ordering the murder of business associate-turned-foe Michael McGurk. He sold his Wolseley Rd mansion for $37 million in 2014.

“There are dark stories,” the old man says. “There’s a lot of them.”

In what may be its only similarity to Yennora, Point Piper doesn’t really have any shops. With the exception of The Royal Motor Yacht Club and the Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club, it’s purely residential.

So I make like the locals do and head down the hill to neighbouring Double Bay where I pay $30 for a “superfood chicken salad”. It involves a bunch of different seeds and something called “carrot ribbons” which I’m pretty sure is just a fancy way of saying shredded carrot.

As I look around at the marble tabletops and ponder whether they’ve been professionally checked for toxic cancers, I do a Google search to see which well-known folks have dined at this slick eatery.

Apparently footballer-turned-Dannii-Minogue-ex-turned-Myer-ambassador Kris Smith and ex-Miss Universe Tegan Martin stopped by for lunch one time.

Nice. But it’s no Ada Nicodemou.