Vanessa Berry

Vanessa Berry is a writer who works with history, memory, archives and the urban environment. She is the author of Gentle and Fierce (2021), Mirror Sydney (2017), Ninety 9 (2013) and Strawberry Hills Forever (2007), the zine series I am a Camera (2000-) and the blog Mirror Sydney. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.
All essays by Vanessa Berry

In the Catalogue
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.
All essays featuring Vanessa Berry
Eccentric Guides: Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney
Mirror Sydney appeals to the notion that people live inside worlds of their own making. This suggests both a certain comprehensiveness or completeness and a limitation: the globe is known in form but so are its borders. However, this is also a world post-globalisation: the great exhibitions of the colonial project have become abandoned variety stores and theme parks, the pathos of which comes from quaintness or the strange, instead of authority or splendour.