Located 18 kilometers south of Sydney's CBD, Sans Souci, has a well-known local love symbol. For years, the house, with the Our Berta's Corner logo standing in front of the door, has been telling the owner of John Hall's love for his dead wife.
The slab house on the corner of Riverside Drive has a brightly colored tile roof, painted by owner John Hall after his wife, Berta, died in 1997, and he hopes the house can be "seen from heaven, so Berta can look down." See how much I love her.
He lifted each tile, painted it in four colors and reinstalled it.
In the years that followed, he added three old children's toy cars to the roof of the garage to enrich the roof.
John Hall died last year at the age of 98, and the house has been vacant since. In recent weeks, the property has been tidied up by trustees and ready to be sold.
Given its superior location, the property is located on the Georges River side of the Bay of Botany and is likely to be demolished and replaced by a new mansion.
The toy car on the roof has been dismantled, and one day in the gale, the Our Berta's Corner sign has fallen as a memory.
John Hall said he and his wife met as a teenager when "she was under 16, I was six years older, an apprentice boiler," and they married in 1942. "Berta spent 16 years here overlooking the Giorgis River," he said.
Every year on Oct. 18, he publishes a poem in a commemorative column in the local newspaper Leader to commemorate the day Berta died.
