Sydney

When I am on the road, risking it all with a rusted-off chain and creaky saddle, I want to be seen, my existence hailed into being only in relation to the cars beside me. I want to be acknowledged by these hulking machines – which, I’m sure, could crush me like a bug without a moment’s hesitation were it not for their simpering drivers inside – as something formidable, something unknowable but fearsome all the same. I present myself like a challenge. Go on then, run me over.

And so when he began to travel for his studies, the boy found his mobility offered him a vantage point from which to relate to people and place. The boy would commute every weekday of his teenage years to and from his suburban home in the southwest and his selective school in inner city Sydney.

Loving someone, however, isn’t so easy. Loving someone for your entire life, even your child, especially your child, can be one of the most difficult things you will ever do.

I was 26, and I didn’t know it yet, but I was set to become an urban geographer. Cycling had nurtured my interest in people and place, in cities and landscape, in society and culture.

By some cosmic sophomoric prank, despite my desire to become what some people call a writer, my true occupation on this earth has always been and always will be captured by the construction ‘a car-man is a car-man is a car-man is a car-man’, and if that formulation makes your skin crawl, try telling me about it, since the only escape from this fate of mine is the one Henry Lawson recommended above, and that salvation is forbidden by religion.

‘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.