"She would frighten off the local drunks and the pigeons from the one remaining window that worked."

Anita Stewart, plastic bags stuffed with provisions hanging from each arm of her oversized mans' gaberdine raincoat, shuffled slowly up the pot-holed hill that led to her home, totally lost in the task before her. Stopping to catch her breath half way up, she rested her packages on an upturned garbage bin at the kerb side and, slipping a dainty foot out of one of her carpet slippers, she turned around pointing her stubborn chin back down the way she had come.

A gust of wind snaffled up the dust from the street, sending it eddying around her feet along with the dead leaves. A beer can rolled aimlessly down the gutter. A loose window flapped open. And shut. And yesterdays' newspaper fluttered haphazardly, trapped by the lid on the upturned bin.

The old woman turned her collar to the wind and her attention to re arranging the pages of the newspaper, satisfied she had missed nothing she carefully folded the paper and slid it into one of the already bursting plastic bags.

A quick glance back down the hill and the shuffling continued.

I couldn't help remembering back to the first time I had met Anita Stewart, twelve years before.

It was one of those sultry, cloudless afternoons in mid-summer where security goes to the wind and the front door remains open long after commonsense says it should. Long shadows had begun to line the street with the promise of some relief. I arrived at the tiny Victoria terrace house I had just rented in Charles Street, Wooloomooloo and opened the grey painted front door.

Stale, musty air wafted out to greet me. Upstairs was stifling. I opened the French doors and stepped out onto the narrow rickety balcony.

To my left lived Maria and Joe Bardetta. Maria could be heard singing an aria from an obscure Italian opera to the accompaniment of delicious waftings of Parmagiana being prepared for dinner.

And to my right, in what used to be the old Sargent's Pie bakery, was the Speedy Welding Workshop wherein worked the Speedy Welding workers and the less satisfying aroma of sweaty bodies and acetylene gas.

It was the custom in Charles Street, after dinner and the heat of a summers day, for the menfolk to escape the duties of the kitchen sink and the stuffiness of their cottages to the cool of the evening air.

The street would come alive.

Card tables and chairs would magically appear on the footpaths along with the playing cards, television sets, hand made 'smokes', Absinthe, Frascati and the inevitable bottles of beer. Neighbours would sit down to settle their differences over a game of Briscola - not, it should be added, always amicably.

At such times the upstairs windows would rattle up and children, dressed more often than not in nothing at all, would watch their parents argue and prattle over this game or that horse while others offered support or made 'book' on their favourites. Eventually, it would end with a little hurt pride, a glass or two of vino and a song from Maria.

These were the times that the Silvetti family would dry out the Mush nets used for prawn trawling and make good the damage caused by the shark traps and the rocks and whatever else lies at the bottom of the Parramatta river.

The nets would festoon the fences and footpaths in Charles Lane, a cross-legged fisherman at each end paying homage with needle and orange cord - it always struck as odd that repairs were made with bright orange cord while the nets were invariably brown - but I never thought to ask why.

Directly opposite me stood Anita Stewart's cottage.

It was one of those quaint dwellings that might have been painted by any five year old in kindergarten. A simple, single sandstone step, worn down to half its hight by well over a hundred years of leather boots, gave rise to a central front door - once painted bright red but now dried out with a crackly patina of neglect.

Four windows symmetrically placed.

Two up.

Two down.

All cracked.

Only one working.

Many years earlier it's walls had been painted, perhaps by someone as a reminder of a Greek or Italian village left behind, on a very proper shade of Gelato blue. But now the successive suns of passing summers had faded its flaking countenance to a powdery, Mediterranean pastel.

To the right and left a collapsing paling fence of wood and occasional rusting corrugated iron ran on, mostly at an angle of 45 degrees, from here to nowhere, protecting nothing from anything and providing little more than an adequate target for the local dogs and a wonderful hiding place for the local children.

It seemed a sad, neglected house.

Sad maybe because many of the adjoining dwellings had been demolished and it stood now alone and partly submerged in a tangled sea of Morning Glory and Wandering Jew and back gardens abandoned by all except distorted Lemon trees. And sad partly because the old lady that lived there seemed every bit as neglected and forgotten as the house.

They were one and the same thing, the house and the old lady. As I stepped onto my balcony, into the heat of that summers day twelve years ago, I was attracted by the sight and sound of an ancient canvas bag on wheels - still turning but pleading for oil with every turn - as they made their way up the street with the owner of that sad little house.

Anita stopped outside her front door and grumbling quietly to herself as she shuffled among the contents in the unseen depths of her trolley from one corner to the other. Her voice came up from the hot pavement below in an unmistakable Irish brogue: "Where the hell are me bloody keys then? I asks, Should never have been in dere in the firs' place."

The search continued. Everything about Anita seemed to creak and groan. Her bones. Her trolley. Her coat - which was far too heavy, considering it was the middle of summer - and eventually, once she had located her keys, her front door. All the creaks and groans up to this point had been muffled and faded like the old lady and her house, but the protest made by the front door was altogether different.

It was a signal.

Suddenly, in the half-light furry shadows were moving everywhere. Little bedraggled things I hadn't noticed while they were still. Drainpipes seemed to detach themselves from the walls. The ground under a parked car started to move. Rotting tree stumps in the vacant lot next door came to life. Twenty or more cats, summoned to dine by the call of that old front door, as they and their parents had been for thirty years or more, clustered and paraded, minced and twisted in correct pecking order outside number fourteen.

Without resting from unpacking her shopping trolly, she greeted them as they came forward.

First to a pie-bald Tom with one eye who was making figure-of-eight passes through he legs" "Allo Blackie! 'Ow's that eye t'day, then? What yer been up to, then?"

Then to an enormous dark brown, battered furry lump who seemed to be wearing dark eyeshades: "'ere's Harry Stottles then, Been up to no good, I'll be bound!"

And on it went.

The air was hot and breathless and the old lady was puffing heavily, but she never once paused until the unloading of her trolley was done when, with a final groan, she dragged it handle first, up the step and into her house.

A few minutes later she reappeared and began to line the edge of the footpath with a row of chipped saucers in varying sizes and colours which she then proceeded to fill with scraps of non-descript fishy things from a large saucepan without a handle - talking to the cats as she did - asking this one to be patient and telling the next how she had spent her day.

Indeed, I learnt more about Anita over the subsequent years from her conversations with her cats than I did from her directly.

The street was narrow and the smell coming up from the street below was unmistakable - for some reason Anita was feeding her cats a concoction of boiled carpet and soiled fish.

Fortunately, there was less fish than there were cats and pretty soon the aroma had been consumed.

My balcony creaked.

Looking up, the old lady smiled a toothless smile that cracked her face in half like a pile of crumbled chalk: "Warm enough fer yer then? Never mind, it'll be cooler next month."

Then, without waiting for a reply, she turned and disappeared behind her front door again. Along with most of her cats.

After that first brief introduction, I got to know Anita fairly well - although she didn't tell me her name for a couple of years. At a hundred decibels her Irish brogue and her piercing tongue was better than any burglar alarm and with it she would keep residents informed of impending doom, announce marriages and deaths, inclement weather, chastise misbehaving children and frighten off local drunks and the pigeons.

All from the one remaining window on the top floor of her little cottage. The only one that worked. On Anita's 70th birthday I gave a small party. It was perhaps her first in fifty years. Three hours before the party was due to start, there was knock at my front door and standing two steps down was Anita. For the occasion wearing a bright pint floral frock covered in yards of bright pink Tulle, bright green Adidas joggers and a sheepish grin.

"Not to early am I? And then, as she spied the cake "Oh my! That for me?"

One week before I ordered a simple sponge cake from the local patisserie - no nuts - I feared for her two remaining teeth.

The baker must have known Anita because the cake was smothered in shocking pink icing and bore in 'fresh eggs' typeface, the solitary word 'Anita'. Implanted in the icing was a haphazard arrangement of silver balls and a discreet forest of candles which produced a satisfying glow and an enormous quantity of smoke as it was lit in my front room like an Olympic torch.

My front parlour opened directly onto the street and a blazing log fire prevented the chill of a lingering winter from sneaking under the three inch gap under the door.

When winter first arrived I had tried to block the gap with brightly coloured sausage-dogs made by Auntie Jean and a few of the members of the local WI. But with the gap between the bottom of the door and the dip in the step, these had been stolen from outside by pulling them under the door. By the time I had equipped most of the houses in Charles Street with draft excluders, summer had arrived and I gave up trying.

Anita settled herself into a Yorkshire chair by the fire and, stuffing a friendly yellow pillow decorated with yellow embroidered daisies, that she had brought with her into the small of her back, she pointed to the warmth with her toes.

She was reserved at first. Suspicious even. But as the fire and a glass or three of my best port did their work, she warmed to the occasion and, for the first time, began to talk about herself. She was born about seventeen miles from Belfast on the 29th September 1902 as Anita Barr. She never knew her mother who died six months after Anita was born. She was raised by elder sisters and her father who managed both his bank in Belfast and his family in County Down with an iron fist.

"Terribly strict, he was. I t'ink he was afraid we'd all go astray without mother dere to look after us. But of course, we never did. We lived in a lovely huge Victorian house with a maid and a beautiful garden with a tennis court. S'all bin pulled down now."

The family was comfortably off and although there was no need for Anita to work, she took up nursing at Belfast General Hospital where she met and began to court Martin, the one and only love of her life. As was the custom in Ireland at that time, the courtship was all very proper and innocent.

"Tinks were very different then. In dose days we didn't run around with men like the girls can today. Even 'olding hands was frowned upon. Now you can go out with any Tom, Dick and Larry - and sleep with them at night - and no matter. But to do that In Ireland in dose days, why you's a started another bloody war!"

"I 'ad an unmarried friend oo 'ad one child already an' was ecpectin' another - well, there was such a fuss about her she went of down to the river and kilt herself."

Martin, it turned out was a policemen and in the two years they were courting, he had risen through the ranks to the position of full detective and, although her father didn't approve "him being a Protestant, an' all", they got married.

The day after the wedding, Martin was dead.

He died on the operating table, at the same hospital in which he and Anita had met, while having an IRA bullet removed from his chest.

"Oh I know all about the IRA! They caught the bloke that did it. He was only a slip of a boy of sixteen - poked a revolver through the open window of Martin's car and shot him once in the chest. He even knew Martin. The boy had a vicious father and Martin had helped him out from time to time. Later they found out Martin's name had been drawn out of a hat somewhere and this was the boy's initiation - he wouldn't have been considered one of their soldiers if he had refused.

"Martin was only 25. "I remember my old granny telling me, just before she died, that they were killing each other when she was a young girl and when her granny was a young girl.

"I'm seventy-nine now and nothing's changed."

Funny. I thought she was seventy, at least it was her seventieth birthday we were celebrating!

"Nothin' changed. It's not the religion, yer know. That's jist an excuse. I was never bitter about Martin's death but I lost my voice for nine months. Delayed shock, they told me. The doctor said I should get away from Ireland and I had a brother in New Zealand. My brother sent me the fare. I nursed there for ten years before coming to Australia.

"I was born in Ireland but I never really knew it. That's why I want to go back. Oh I have lived well enough here in Australia, but nothing can make up for leaving your homeland and your kin folk. Relationships are the only really important t'ing in life because no matter how wealthy you are in your life time, all your possessions get left in the hearse when you go to the grave. "

One day Anita asked me to fix a dripping tap. A simple job involving a ten cent washer, a soliloquy in blank prose over a couple of scraped knuckles and about three hours of hard labour.

With the job done, I was invited to the inevitable cuppa in her parlour. It was brought out in a coronation mug - George VI - and matching enamel tray.

Anita's parlour filled the lower half of the cottage. Flower patterned lino covered the uneven floor and into it a dark brown path had been worn, leading from room to room. Over the window a pair of crumbling lace curtains hung limply, speckled with dust from the falling plaster from the hole in the ceiling.

An armchair, ancient and comfy, was drawn up, to a fireplace stuffed with newspapers ready for burning. In one corner a Laminex table with a pair of chrome chairs was cluttered with popular magazines - all about three years old. In another, a small cupboard, one corner resting on half a brick, sported a collection of framed family photographs.

"This one" explained Anita as she handed me a simple wooden frame "is when I was nursing in New Zealand."

I saw no resemblance in the eager young face that stared back at me from the faded picture to the old woman seated before me, with one craggy finger delicately crooked around the handle of her tea cup. Anita's Irish stubbornness stood by her well during the early seventies, when the population of the 'Loo' began to diminish as people gave way to the pressure of local councils and greedy developers who were anticipating a major redevelopment of the area. Maria and Joe Bardetta had gone. So to had Speedy welders and the Silvetti family along with their houses and possessions, to be scattered all over Sydney. A community destroyed by greed.

For nearly six years Anita fought a lonely battle refusing to leave her old home. She refused to be impressed by the endless stream of nattily dressed business men that came banging at her door with bunches of flowers and boxes of chocolates and promises of a better life.

Their methods and promises were extraordinary. At one time she was shown a model of the site around her home, a twenty story high rise built on all four sides and in the middle, in the chimney well, sat Anita's little cottage.

She asked them to leave and continued her stubborn battle. Number fourteen may have been a dump to the developers, but it was 'home' to Anita. And had been for thirty years.

"Anita's House was the only one left in the middle of a four block desolation of mud and rubble."

Around her everyone sold out and their houses were demolished until, eventually, number 14 was the only building remaining. Even more sad and neglected that before, in the middle of a four block desolation of mud and rubble.