Vanessa Berry

At my desk, surrounded by its objects, I can slip into a feeling that I am a thing amid other things, a vessel inside which words gather and disperse.

Live in a place and it weaves into your identity, its atmospheres entwining with your own. To write of these atmospheres is to examine the texture of the weave and how self and place are braided together. In Sydney I have a lifelong relationship to the city and the suburbs that underlies my observations but in Reykjavík I am a visitor, here for only a week.

‘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.’

Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney is an important contribution to a growing body of writing that takes cities and place as…