This one is for people who landed recently.
Ten questions come up more than everything else combined, in Sydney and Melbourne. Here they are in the order I get them, not in order of importance. The broader ones, whether any of this is real, are in the feng shui FAQ.
1. Is north-facing actually good news?
Yes.
Sydney sits just under thirty-four degrees south and the midday sun is in the north all year, so north-facing rooms and back gardens get light in every season while the south side never sees midday sun. From October to March, sunrise and sunset move round to the south of due east and west, but that’s an hour of low light at each end of the day and it doesn’t change the rule. What you brought with you reads the other way up here.
Not all of it flips. Landform doesn’t, the Nine Periods run globally, and the twenty-four mountains on the compass read as they do at home. What flips is the Later Heaven placement of the trigrams and how the solar terms get applied, which is set out in why “facing south” fails in Australia.
In a listing, north-facing sometimes means the street frontage and sometimes the back garden. Ask the agent which one, on the day you inspect.
2. Is a rental worth looking at?
Yes, but it’s a different kind of looking.
The lease runs a year and the only thing you can move is furniture. So I look at that layer: where the bed goes, how far the desk and sofa sit from the window. Where you’re standing when the front door opens counts too, and that has its own piece, as does where the stove sits. Door swings, walls, drainage, none of that is on the table in a rental.
The bed is the one worth moving. If somebody in the house isn’t sleeping, see a GP first and rule out the medical causes; what’s left often does involve where the bed sits, and the bedroom piece covers it. Flats have their own constraints, here.
Your agent will inspect the place a few times a year, with written notice, walking room to room taking photographs. How many is capped differently in each state, and the number is in your lease. Read that clause before you sign. People read that letter as though they’re in trouble. It’s routine. Disputes go to the Tenants’ Union or a solicitor, not to me; I don’t read contracts.
3. Does the move-in need a date?
Settlement day isn’t yours to pick. Your solicitor and the bank set it, and the keys arrive when they arrive.
The move-in can run on its own clock. Open the door, put the lights on, boil a kettle, carry in rice and oil and salt. The furniture comes whenever the truck is cheap, which is midweek. Nothing says the two happen the same day.
If you want a date chosen properly, it starts from the birth data of the people who’ll be living there. That almanac line reading suitable for moving house is scheduled off the day itself and has nothing to do with who is moving in. Method in the date selection piece.
4. Who takes the master bedroom, and which room for the child?
Parents in the master. Usually that’s right.
Two things differ from what you’re used to. New builds put an ensuite off the master, which gives the room two doors and changes the bed-and-door question. And the brick houses from the seventies and eighties have master windows that are wide, low and single-glazed; in July that wall is as cold as the outside of the house.
For a child’s room I take quiet and steady daylight first, bearings second. Past that you set the family’s birth data against the house, because the same room with a different person in it gives a different answer. That layer is in what a survey covers.
5. Which way should the desk face?
Visible things first. A wall behind the chair, not a doorway. Light from the side, from the left for a right-handed child. Not facing into a window all afternoon; the light here is hard. The lamp matters more than the direction.
The bearing layer needs a chart, and no table gives it to you.
The part of this I’d stand behind is the physical list. Whether turning a desk to a favourable bearing helps with schoolwork, I can’t tell you. Too much else is moving: the teacher, the friends, whether they slept, whether the household was shouting that term. I can’t pull the desk out of that and put a number on it. Some practitioners lean hard on this one. I still chart it. I’m not confident about that layer and I say so in the report.
6. Where does the altar or ancestor tablet go in a flat?
You probably don’t need a permanent tablet. A paper one, written for the occasion and burned or put away afterwards, is more realistic in a two-bedroom flat than a wooden tablet standing all year. A permanent one assumes somebody tends it and the next generation takes it on. Same for a standing god statue: easy to bring home, yours for forty years.
The old placement rules cover the rest. Solid wall behind it, not in a bedroom, not facing the bathroom door. The one about beams gets argued over; I keep it.
The smoke alarm is what stops people. Every dwelling here has to have one, flats included, and within one dwelling they’re usually interconnected, so one sets off the rest; ask the building manager which kind yours are. Incense smoulders rather than burns, ten or fifteen minutes of smoke, and a photoelectric detector picks that up almost every time. Mine is in the hallway ceiling, three metres from the kitchen, and frying fish sets it off. So people tape over the detector or take the battery out. Don’t. In most states it’s an offence to cover or remove one, and worse again in a rented property. The way round it is short sticks, lit under the rangehood with the extraction on full, pinched out when you’re done. Or no incense: clean water, tea, fruit and a bowl of rice have always counted as offerings. That, and how to do the rites at a distance, is in ancestor rites overseas.
7. The ornaments my mother brought over
A pixiu, a gourd, a string of five-emperor coins, a pair of small stone lions, flown nine hours in a suitcase, and the first question on landing is where to put them.
Somewhere you like looking at, out of the walkway, where they won’t get knocked off. Or nowhere. I make no claims for these objects and I don’t sell them; there’s a piece on the category.
Wooden carvings, bamboo, dried goods, seeds and herbal medicine are taken seriously at the border. Declared, most of it goes through; undeclared and found is an expensive conversation. Check the Department of Agriculture’s incoming-goods pages before packing.
8. Should I get a house looked at before buying?
Yes, and it has to be before contracts are exchanged, while you still have the option of not buying this one. Once you’ve signed, that option is gone.
Most people think of me after they’ve signed. So the first thing I ask is whether you have: if you haven’t, the report can help you choose between houses; if you have, all it can do is work inside the one you bought.
What gets checked and what the report looks like are in that piece. A feng shui report is not a building and pest inspection, and I don’t read title documents or contract clauses. Those belong to your building inspector and your solicitor or conveyancer.
9. Qingming and the Ghost Festival down here
The dates don’t move.
The question comes as: the seasons are reversed, so shouldn’t Qingming shift to October? No. Seasonal strength belongs to a different layer of the craft. The grave-sweeping days are an agreement between living people, and if you move yours to October your relatives are still doing theirs in April. Why the solar term dates don’t follow the seasons is worked through in solar terms below the equator.
Know what you’re in for: Qingming here falls in autumn, the Ghost Festival lands as winter turns, and for the first few years the names of the solar terms won’t match anything your body is telling you.
If you can’t fly back, do the rite at a distance and face the direction the grave actually lies in, which a phone map will give you. No compass. Some people convert that bearing through the trigrams first. I don’t, though I haven’t got a hard argument for it beyond wanting the direction the person is actually lying in. Burning paper depends on the cemetery; ring first and ask whether there’s a burner and when it closes.
10. How long does it take, and what do you need from me?
An hour or two on site, longer for a big house or one that’s been extended twice. Nothing gets handed over on the day. The report is written afterwards and reaches you a few days later.
Send me the address and a floor plan, contract drawings if you have them. Birth date and time for everyone who’ll be living there. And the one or two things you actually want solved, which most people leave out, and which decides where the report puts its weight.
An unreliable birth time doesn’t stop a reading, it loosens some of the judgements: what a bazi chart can and cannot tell you.
Booking and fees: https://booking.dao.today/book . Email works too, iching@dao.today.
Most of this you’ll work out yourself inside the first year. Don’t start rearranging the house the week you land. Live in it a couple of months, and call someone when you’re actually stuck.
No outcomes promised. Anything involving illness, law or money goes to the person qualified for it.