Sydney

‘The plague archive that interests me most combines the factual and the fictional, the historical and the contemporary. Reading the stories of Australia’s early twentieth-century plague outbreak gives us insight into the emotional experience of an epidemic. Further, reading the plague archive in the contemporary moment shows that the emotional consequences of an epidemic do not stop with the abeyance of the disease. The impact of the epidemic continues, and is reworked and understood in new ways as the archive is reread.’

I walked with the knowledge that inside the present-day city are many times and layers, and that writing is a way of drawing them out. A novel and a department store, a hair net, a square of corduroy fabric in a catalogue, and a photograph of women at their desks in a drafting room form a constellation within this wider network.

After Sydney house prices and rents skyrocketed in the 1990s and early 2000s and never came back down, Marrickville’s large, empty warehouses became an attractive alternative to sharehousing – especially for artists in need of space.

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives. The fires are writing new stories into the very rocks and soil of our land, this land that has always had stories engraved in rocks and soil, this always-was-always-will-be Aboriginal land. Our newest story is pyrogenic. Born of fire, it will throw green shoots out from blackness. It must.

In the process of writing, clutter accumulates. A writer’s clutter can be physical, like the bundles of papers, notes, and books on my desk. It can be processual: the swarm of edits on the marked-up page of a draft, or the ‘offcuts’ file of this essay which is longer than the essay itself. It can be digital – a cluttered computer desktop, hundreds of browser bookmarks, accumulations of draft files – or mental, in the psychic turbulence of the process, in the ideas never followed through, in digressions and tangents and distractions.

I was not a writer when I lived in Singapore. I do not know if I would have become a writer if I had stayed. I do not know if I would still be a writer if I returned.

Congratulations, our teacher said on the last day of school. You’ve all won the lottery. I’ve been with the railway for 47 years, and I’ve never worked a day in my life.

I cannot help but consider—from my privileged vantage in a picnic hut overlooking Bronte beach—that the modern office is an artefact from a time when work needed to be conducted in a different manner and atmosphere, and that now, unlocked from the brightly-lit, uncomfortable, stifling, energy-intensive, disease spreading, anxiety-inducing structures in which work commonly took place over the last century, we ought to start thinking very differently about what a place of work might be.

Each area conjures, true or not, a different kind of person, a different kind of suburbia, a different kind of cultural make up.

I need to go back to that daylight encounter in Homer Street and walk up to that fox, and look it in the eye. I need to have a better conversation with that fox, a more honest one.