I took a year out to go Down Under to Sydney. No 25 Theodore Street was a small, three-bedroom bungalow in Balmain that looked like a summerhouse. It had a big kitchen and sitting room and a pool and was the epicentre of our Australian experience.

The pool’s sole purpose was for the e-mails home. I think we went in three times. It was a big ornament. I went to Australia with my mates Dunney, Dave and Louise, a couple, and Reg, an editor who’s worked with a vast range of musicians from U2 to the Kelly Family.

He ended up helping Baz Luhrmann on Moulin Rouge. Getting the house was our major project. We’d nowhere to live, no phone, and no jobs. It was a reality check. We’d packed in really good jobs and found ourselves in a manky hotel in King’s Cross, Sydney’s red-light district. It was a great incentive to find a place to live.

Looking like a bunch of backpacking Paddies, we had terrible trouble convincing the relevant persons that we were respectable potential residents. Estate agents ran a mile the minute they saw us.

Most of the backpackers were living in Bondi, in two-bedroom apartments, with 18 Paddies crashing and only three working. We were Dalkey backpackers; there was no roughing it for us.

After fits of giggles in estate agents, we adopted a strategy where Louise and I would go in and talk and the others would wait outside. We wanted to live in Balmain. It’s really laid-back with great bars, cafes and a good mix of population — not “wow” in a “we’re so alternative way”. We probably couldn’t afford to live there now. Balmain has since exploded in terms of property prices.

We found that the house in Theodore Street was available for only six months. Renting culture is huge in Sydney and most people want a 12 or 24-month lease. The lying we did to get the place — references for jobs we didn’t have, friends writing references.

Dave and Louise still needed work references and a friend of ours in IBM had given them a blank page with her business card attached as a reference. The estate agent promptly called the payroll and human resources departments and was told that they had no record of them as employees.

We didn’t hear anything for two days. Eventually I rang her back and told her the truth, that we didn’t want to live in Bondi and that we were a bit old for backpacking. She was tough but eventually she let us have the place.

Because of the rental culture, nowhere is furnished. Getting furniture was a complete pantomime. We bought stuff from garage sales and adverts in the local supermarket. We bought a double bed from a woman who wasn’t expecting it to sell so fast and then was left with nowhere to sleep for about two weeks. We bought a couple of chairs from the chaplain of a church that was being renovated. We bought the nastiest sofa, a brown plastic one with orange cushions, from the St Vincent de Paul.

Dave and Louise shared the double room.

Us lads alternated the two other rooms — one had two single beds; the other had just one single bed. We used to rotate the rooms but nobody wanted to sleep with me because I’m a ferocious snorer. The best time was when I was in the room on my own. It was very strange to have five people sharing with each other, maybe in college, but there were very few rows. Nothing compared to the amount of laughs.

For the first month in the house the only people to ring our bell were Domino’s Pizza. The day we moved in we saw Fisher from Home and Away in our local shop. It turned out that he lived in the street behind. As Dalkey kids, we were delighted to still have celebrities in our neighbourhood. It became a great social house with lots of barbies and drinking at home — we couldn’t afford to go clubbing or eat out.

The Aussies are so environmentally conscious and since this was 1999 we still had no experience of wheelie bins. We were leaving black sacks of rubbish on the road, but the bin men wouldn’t pick them up.

We tried to bribe them, leaving lots of chocolate and little notes with “ah go on”. They responded with little note of their own saying “no”. So every two weeks or so we’d run around under cover of darkness and deposit our rubbish into other people’s bins.

We were only in the house a few weeks and broke when Easter came along. We’d resigned ourselves to spending the weekend watching telly. Woke up on Good Friday and the telly blew. We spent four days looking at each other. We were so bored, we ended up taking the bus to get out of the house for a few hours. I think we bought each other a Crème Egg for Easter.

The house was built for summer in that it had great air-conditioning but lousy heating. The winter was very damp and I spent most of it wearing musty clothes. I knew I was home when I was no longer selecting my clothes by smell.

Darren Smith of Windmill Lane Entertainment is a judge on RTE 1’s You’re a Star

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