Noah & Greta Smith Family Home, Craigmore

A Home for the Return

The Noah and Greta Smith family home stood at the quiet end of a court in Craigmore, a suburb laid out during the rapid expansion of Adelaide's northern fringe in the early 1980s. The house itself had been built in 1986, a single-storey brick veneer — five bedrooms, a separate lounge and family room, a galley kitchen with a breakfast bar, and an attached double garage. Its terracotta tile roof had weathered two decades of Adelaide summers before the Smiths bought it in the autumn of 2006.

Noah and Greta had signed the contract in May 2006, after ten years in Broken Hill, with what remained of the proceeds from the sale of their auto workshop and the equity from their mining-town home.

The house was larger than they strictly needed for four children and smaller than what Greta had allowed herself to imagine, but it sat on a well-proportioned quarter-acre block that answered her quiet insistence that their next home must have a garden worth working. There was a mature yellow gum in the back corner, a row of camellias along the western fence, and an apricot tree so ill-kept that Greta laughed at the first sight of it and said it would take her five years to bring it back. It took her four.

The Architecture of a Family

The children worked out their own corners of the house within the first fortnight. Lisa, twelve and already feeling the shape of adolescence closing around her, claimed the bedroom furthest from the lounge, the one with the small window that faced the side fence and let in the early afternoon sun. Eli, eleven, took the room next to hers and filled one wall with Blu-Tacked Lego instruction booklets he refused to throw away.

Jerome, nine, and Charles, almost five, were put in together at the other end of the hallway, sharing a bunk bed that Noah assembled in an afternoon from a flat-pack he had carried in from the Elizabeth hardware strip. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. It lasted eleven years.

Noah established his study at the front of the house, in the small fourth bedroom off the entry hall. He installed a heavy oak desk that had belonged to Thomas, a filing cabinet for the household administration Greta had quietly deferred to him for thirteen years, and a bookshelf that held workshop manuals, scripture, and a leather-bound set of the Ensign that his mother had given him the year she died. The room was the calmest in the house. Greta kept her sewing elsewhere, and the children knew without being told that the study was the place you went to speak with Noah seriously, not to ask for a lift to training or permission to borrow the car.

Greta made the kitchen hers from the first evening, unpacking her good pans before the bedrooms were even sorted. The galley layout was narrow, but the breakfast bar opened onto the family room, and she liked that she could see the television and the back garden at once. Her stand mixer sat at the end of the bench, uncovered, never put away. Above the sink she pinned a small watercolour of the Flinders Ranges that Robert had painted for her in 1989. It hung there for twelve years, fading a little each summer.

Rhythms of Faith and Fire

The house ran on Mormon time. Monday evenings belonged to Family Home Evening — a ritual Noah observed with the dutiful seriousness he brought to everything, and Greta with the cheerful elasticity that made it survive Charles's teenage scepticism and Jerome's quiet disengagement. The lounge was cleared of magazines, a hymn was sung badly, a lesson was delivered with varying degrees of preparation, and Greta produced something — slice, scones, a pavlova if there were leftovers to use up — that the children could be trusted to converge on without being asked twice.

Sunday mornings began at six and ended long after dinner. The ironed white shirts hung in an accusatory row from the laundry door every Saturday night, and Charles, from the age of about ten, made a small unsanctioned game of finding new places to hide the one he hated most.

The food of the house was Greta's food. She cooked lasagne in an enormous ceramic dish that never left the oven long enough to cool down properly between bakes. She made pancakes on Saturday mornings with a reliability the children eventually mistook for a law of nature. She made soups in winter — pumpkin, leek, minestrone — and paired them with a crumble of whatever stone fruit was in season. She baked bread when she was anxious, and everyone in the house learned to read the weight of her worries by the number of loaves cooling on the rack.

Noah's contribution to the house's atmosphere was different and, in its way, steadier. On Saturday afternoons he was in the garage with the door rolled up, a cassette of Dire Straits or Fleetwood Mac playing low, and whichever son happened to be nearby passing him spanners in the wrong order. On summer evenings he built a fire in the steel brazier he had welded himself from the drum of an old compressor, and the family collected in cheap camp chairs around the backyard while the sky over Craigmore turned the particular violet that Adelaide reserved for February.

The children roasted marshmallows on green sticks Jerome cut from the leucoxylon. Noah spoke rarely. Everyone understood that the silences at the fire were not the same as the silences at the dinner table, and no one tried to fill them.

Greta's Garden and the Slow Work of Years

The back garden became Greta's second studio across the years that followed. She ripped out the tired annuals the previous owners had stuck along the path and replaced them with kangaroo paw, correa, grevillea, and the silver-grey sprawl of Westringia she had first fallen for in Broken Hill. She built raised beds from sleepers Noah salvaged from a demolition job in Salisbury, and she planted tomatoes, zucchini, silverbeet, rhubarb, and a hedge of rosemary that grew so vigorously it eventually swallowed the back step. The apricot tree was rehabilitated through four seasons of careful pruning and a regime of seaweed solution she mixed in a watering can kept specifically for that purpose.

She taught the children the names of things as she worked. Jerome, who had already begun collecting injured creatures from the bushland edges of his Broken Hill childhood, absorbed her botanical vocabulary the way other children absorbed pop lyrics. Charles, less patient, helped when bribed with frozen mango pieces and complained when not. Lisa drifted in from time to time with books and sat reading in the shade of the apricot tree while Greta weeded around her feet. Eli tolerated the garden and preferred the garage. None of them knew, during those afternoons, that Greta was the one teaching them how to inhabit a place properly. They thought she was just puttering.

The front of the house was kept simpler. A jacaranda struggled in the street verge and produced a single disappointing bloom each November. Greta grew roses, because she felt a home in Adelaide ought to have them, and maintained a standing arrangement with a neighbour three doors down who kept chickens and swapped eggs for clippings and advice.

A House at Full Capacity

Between 2009 and 2015 the house was as full as it would ever be. Eli was on the path that would take him through a mission and into the seriousness he had always carried. Jerome was in the middle years, quietly gathering the field notes that no one yet recognised as a vocation. Charles, the last in, made the house louder than it had any right to be — a whirlwind of cricket pads, textas without lids, and half-finished Lego projects that accumulated on every surface until Greta declared an amnesty.

On the occasional weekend, Paul visited from Broken Hill with Claire and the grandchildren, Mack and Rose, and the small house absorbed extra people with the practised elasticity of a place that had long ago learned how to make room. On very rare occasions Luke appeared from Tasmania, staying a night or two, always leaving earlier than expected, and the house held his absence afterwards as carefully as it had held his presence.

Nibbles lived on a shelf in Jerome's half of the shared bedroom. Millie arrived in 2017, rescued from a situation nobody in the house ever heard the full details of, and spent her first weeks hiding behind the couch before she understood that no one in this place was going to raise a hand to her. The hallway between the lounge and the back door bore the faint scuffing of her nails for the rest of the year.

The Thinning Years

From 2015 onwards the house began, imperceptibly at first, to thin out. Lisa moved to Salt Lake City after marrying Will Marshall. Eli departed for his mission in late 2016 and returned two years later a slightly different young man in the same body. Jerome enrolled at the University of Adelaide in 2016 and stayed in his old bedroom because the commute was manageable and the rent was not. Charles, fourteen in 2015, became the only child in the house whose rhythms still required negotiation, and Greta found herself cooking for three on weeknights for the first time since before 1994.

Heather Atwell's death in February 2017 reached the house through a phone call Noah took in the study with the door closed. He came out after twenty minutes, told Greta quietly, and then went into the garage for the rest of the afternoon. Paul and Luke were not at the house that week. The grief that moved through the Craigmore home afterwards was the particular grief of a second marriage reckoning with the death of a first wife who had never been welcome at the table. Greta prayed for her that Sunday and said nothing about it aloud to anyone.

The Fracture of July

Paul went missing from Broken Hill on 23 July 2018, and from that moment the house ceased to be a house and became a switchboard. Claire rang first, frantic, at eleven at night. Officer Felicity Massey of the Broken Hill Police rang the following morning. Greta rang Luke. Luke did not answer. Greta rang him again, and again, and texted between calls with a kind of escalating unsteadiness that Noah, sitting at the kitchen bench with a cold mug of tea in front of him, watched in silence because he could think of nothing useful to say. The phone became an object of dread. The kitchen, always the brightest room in the house, felt for the first time in twelve years like somewhere you went to brace yourself.

Luke arrived unannounced on the morning of 1 August 2018. He walked past Greta in the hallway, went into the study with Noah, and closed the door. Jerome, who had come out of the bathroom at the wrong moment, heard enough of what followed to know that what was being discussed was not Paul. Greta waited in the kitchen. Charles played a video game in the family room at an unusually low volume.

When the Portal opened in the study it made a sound the house had never previously contained — a low harmonic, not loud, but of a wrongness that the walls themselves seemed to register. Jerome opened the study door in time to see the wall behind Thomas's oak desk distort into something that was not a wall, and his parents step towards it hand in hand. He followed because he could think of no other motion his body would accept.

Millie was retrieved from the Craigmore Animal Care Centre several days later by Beatrix Cramer.