North Shore Mums: The Hidden Secrets Behind Their Perfect Lives

I’m not an especially religious woman, but I’ve long had a theory: if God created a waiting room before the pearly gates, it must be Sydney’s North Shore.

Admit it — the image fits. You could die amid the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll of Bondi or Double Bay, only to wake up in the sleepy suburbs of Lane Cove, Neutral Bay or Pymble, where the excitement is about as potent as a mug of lukewarm tea.

There, you would gradually disappear into a world of immaculate streets, twitching curtains and gleaming four-wheel drives clogging Military Road. Meanwhile, residents — particularly the wives — would be screaming into Cath Kidston cushions from sheer boredom and despair, sobbing that surely their lives could not end here, in postcode 2088.

What a punishment.

In my view, anyone who moves to the North Shore — especially from Sydney’s eastern suburbs — has either grown weary of life or surrendered. Although, hang on, that’s absurd. People don’t move to the North Shore from anywhere beyond Rushcutters Park. It simply isn’t done.

On the rare occasions I’ve crossed the bridge for brunch at Balmoral Bathers, I’m usually fighting sleep by the time I reach Cremorne. If you want to investigate the causes of narcolepsy, try spending a few hours in Waverton.

All right, all right — I’m joking. And before I’m stormed by a mob of furious private-school mothers or Macquarie Bank’s private-equity crowd, aggressively loosening their MJ Bale ties, I’ll do something I don’t often do: admit I was wrong.

You fooled me, North Shore. I had always imagined you as one enormous retirement village. But I’ve recently learned that couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to two close friends who once lived on Sydney’s Lower North Shore — and I’ll explain shortly why they no longer do — the area is a hotbed of the swinging lifestyle.

And by swinging, I mean sex — not an innovative lawn-bowls technique.

Yes, I was surprised too. But my friends say the scene is so widespread among the polished school mums and their banker husbands that both eventually packed up and moved back across the harbour to the city.

“It was wild,” one of my girlfriends told me. And, I should point out, she is hardly naïve.

My friends are not a dull or sheltered group. We are sociable, outgoing, open-minded and non-judgemental. Some are married with children; others, like me, are separated singles. All of us are over 40, and we have certainly experienced plenty in life.

So these women are not easily shocked — yet even they were taken aback by what was happening just off Military Road.

It began when one friend met a fellow school mum for coffee after Pilates. Coffee became lunch, lunch became several bottles of white wine, and before long she had been invited back to the woman’s multimillion-dollar home.

That was when the afternoon took an unexpected turn.

Both women had been drinking, but my friend remembers the conversation clearly. “She began complimenting my activewear, saying she couldn’t stop looking at me during Pilates and that she knew her husband would find me attractive,” she said. By then, she was starting to feel uneasy.

“Then she told me about the parties they hosted. She said that if I ever wanted to come along, I could bring my partner — and she would make sure we were ‘entertained’.”

Turns out the swinging scene is alive and kicking among those North Shore mums, much to the horror of my friend, who genuinely felt she was being ‘groomed’.

Now, like I said, my friends and I aren’t a judgemental lot – and I’d be the biggest hypocrite if I judged these women, nor would I ever kink-shame. But honestly, in these sleepy suburbs? I always assumed Sundays were for hosing down the Range Rover in the driveway, not sleepily stumbling out of your neighbour’s house in last night’s dress.

I’ve always said I know the secrets that go on behind the walls of waterfront mansions, but I was talking about Double Bay, not bloody Crows Nest.

Of course, what consenting adults do behind closed doors is entirely their business – but the horror on both my friends’ faces as they relayed their shock was, frankly, hilarious.

One school mum even tried to hit on my friend, telling her she’d had affairs with a few of the other mums, bonking when their husbands were at work, and that my friend should ‘loosen up and try it some time’. 

It takes a lot to shock me, but even I nearly spat out my tea – suddenly wondering if we were the boring ones after all.

We’re talking about respectable, law-abiding citizens: the sort who go to Aspen in summer and Positano in winter, whose kids attend Loreto or Shore, who live in grand homes with rose gardens and shop at Husk – yet behind their electric gates, they’re tearing their clothes off with Penny and Brian from number 10.

Unbelievable.

My friends got sick of dodging their neighbours and Pilates pals and, for that and other reasons, decided to move back across the bridge – where their biggest worry is finding the car in Westfield, not avoiding the lustful gazes of North Shore mums. 

Bondi and the east might be showy, sunburnt and brash, but it has one big upside: rarely do I hear about the nauseating swinging scene (except for some mansion in Vaucluse where you have to be ‘in the know’ to get an invite – and I’m clearly not).

Stuck-up residents over the bridge are famous for their disdain for the east, claiming the North is for a quieter, more civilised life, more space and wide driveways. Pah!

Maybe that’s where I’ve got the North Shore all wrong; perhaps behind the school fêtes, polite small talk and clipped hedges lies the perfect disguise. Maybe it’s not God’s waiting room after all, but a big bloody afterparty.