Suburbs

We circle, we move, we leave and return. The grass isn’t still. Nor the water. Nothing is static. Country extends over borders.

In these Annandale terraces we share more than walls; we share the sight of the jacaranda flowering in November and the yellow wattle flowering in July. Between the roar of planes on the flight path and the speedy SUVs, we hear the warbling and shrieks of currawongs, native mynahs and rainbow lorikeets. We share conversation: of what we are cooking for dinner, how tired we are from our work-a-day lives, and speculation of which uncouth residents dumped their rubbish, or let their pampered dogs crap, on our nature’s strip. One neighbour who has lived here over thirty years tells me how her children once played, unsupervised, on the street till nightfall; I remember it because it was also the time of my own childhood in another suburb further to Sydney’s west…

For all the not-hereness, not-thereness of Aboriginality under colonisation, it seems that Redfern is the best place in Sydney to find what it means to be neither here nor there. A place to build an Indigenous self and community from what is physically and conceptually displaced.

‘We belong to people, we belong to places, we belong to ourselves. When you uproot yourself, when you decide to permanently leave somewhere, you are saying to your family, your friends, I no longer belong here. This is not the place where I can become who I want to become. You aren’t the people who I can belong to. So you go and live somewhere else, hoping that’s where you can belong. When you leave, no matter how amicable the terms of separation, you hurt those who you belonged to, and you hurt yourself.’

I arrived in Waterloo in mid-2015 when ‘apartmentia’ was already in full swing. From my base on the ground floor of a new apartment complex I have watched industrial facades disappear behind scaffolding for a few months to reappear as industrially-inspired, luxury living. Workers cottages and red brick bungalows are now a vestigial presence among multi-storey apartment blocks with bright feature walls and laser-cut cladding.

Cronulla had changed, and the image of it I still carried was one that had set in amber, and had become as kitsch and heavy as a paperweight – not to mention as obsolete.

‘Sydney Park, with its curved expanses of grass and pockets of trees, is a verdant moonscape, a constructed topography of rises and falls. From the top of the highest hill the park seems caught between the city skyline and Botany Bay to the south, where at night the airport glows with a sulphurous aura. It is a place to look out from as much as to consider what is underfoot. Rumour has it that somewhere in the park is the skeleton of a circus elephant, buried here during the park’s days as a rubbish tip in the 1970s, along with the polystyrene cups, milk bottles and broken toys that filled the city’s trash bags.’

At first glance, the hero-figure of both Louis Nowra’s ‘biography’ of Kings Cross and Tony Moore’s history of Australia’s bohemians is the urban flâneur, but their approaches to this chameleon subject are as disparate as their divergent purposes.