In the middle of May, I head to bed tracking my friend’s flight as she leaves Heathrow. 16.5 hours remaining, the website declares, and so I wake up to watch as she flies over northern India, getting closer and closer to Darwin – to Australia.
I remember a group of my London friends doing the same – flight tracking – when I left London, and their remarks in our group chat that witnessing the flight in real time made them aware just how far away Australia is.
More than half a year later, I think of how far away London is now. In recent weeks and months, I’ve met people who’ve been away from ‘home’ for far longer than my time in London and find myself ready to almost dismiss my time there by virtue of it being ‘less’. As if the reflex to minimise and reduce will make them feel somehow reassured – about what I’m not quite sure. Strange, these actions we find ourselves defaulting to.
But – here, now, tracking my friend’s flight – there’s something in the repetition of the act, albeit experienced from the other perspective, that pulls into focus a sense of pride, along with a sense of distance between the two places. It’s making me start to realise the extent of what I achieved by living there, far from family and friends who knew me so well, for so many years. Here, there: the gulf in between.
My friend flies on from Darwin to Melbourne and sends me photos when she arrives. I’m surprised by the force and depth of relief I feel along with the giddy sense of joy: a London love on Australian soil. Soon, I too will fly to Melbourne, and we’ll have a reunion on the other side of the world from where we last said goodbye. I can’t wait.
‘At night we heard the howling of the gale and it brought to mind things untamed and unbidden, things within each of us that we were not yet ready to face, let alone comprehend.’
– Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees
We wake up one morning in early May to find that an Antarctic breeze has settled over the city, catching in our bones and suddenly there it is — the stark beginning of winter. We gather tights from the back of the cupboard, unfurl winter layers, fetch scarves and wind them around ourselves.
Still — in the middle of the day while we eat lunch in a nearby park with the sun full on our faces, we quickly overheat.
The luxury of living close to the coast means facing the tyranny of endless hills. The daily commute is filled with the ups and downs of Darlinghurst. I remind myself it’s good exercise as my muscles strain against the incline of the hill.
One evening I’m late home from a party and catch an unfamiliar bus. In the darkness of night, I’m able to navigate myself home – down through streets running in the opposite direction to which I usually travel. Maybe I know this area better than I realise.
The weather fluctuates. One Saturday I attempt a morning jog but the air is so thick with humidity that I am dripping with sweat five minutes in, having merely walked uphill to the nearby markets. I meet a friend for brunch later that day and we sit on a residential fence neighbouring the cafe while waiting for a table, enjoying the reprieve brought by the shade of a nearby tree.
Having lived in an inner-east bubble for the past three months, I’ve recently been venturing back to the familiar inner-west more and more, week by week. One weekend, a lunch in Erskineville is followed by a leisurely long walk and talk with a friend down Newtown’s King Street, through Redfern and Darlington, up Cleveland Street, through sunny Prince Alfred Park, back towards the east.
Traversing the inner-city pulls into sharp contrast the difference between the traditionally wealthy inner-east and the youthful, more rebellious inner-west. Each has their own sense of style, taste, and way of being. It’s making me realise which one I prefer.
‘It’s sunset now. The garden is fed and pruned and mulched, the pavers swept, new seedlings in the ground. All that’s needed from here is everything we already have: the autumn sunshine, a little rain, and time to let it grow.’
– Charlotte Wood, The Luminous Solution
The Sydney Writers’ Festival rolls into town. Sarah Winman talks about the role of luck and coincidence. She notes the alignment she must feel for luck to arrive in her life: a sense of being grounded mixed with a sense of the spiritual; an openness to the possibilities of life. She posits the idea that the things that are meant to be in her life arrive when she is ready to welcome them.
Maybe there’s more truth in that sentiment than I’d like to admit. After all, isn’t it far easier to think we can maintain a sense of control over our lives – even, or especially, after events of recent years – than accept that we can do little to will our dreams and desires to happen?
The warmth of Sydney continues to be a shock. The middle of May is met with a heat and humidity so strong that I peel off layers one by one along my commute until I’m left sweating through a light tee a few weeks out from the start of a Sydney winter. At the start of April, a weekend in Melbourne required a chore jacket for warmth yet it only begins to be cool enough near the end of May in Sydney to wear it. The two major cities with an entire six weeks difference between their change of seasons.
Tentatively, week by week, morning by morning, I begin a ritual of yoga. Speaker on, candle lit, mat rolled out in the space between bed and door.
‘Find your place on your mat,’ my London yoga instructors used to begin each session with – meant both in the physical and spiritual sense. Ground yourself, be present, be open to receive.
But yoga on my own is far from the sense of experiencing it in a room of others. There’s an otherworldly sense of sharing the same repeated movements within a group; breathing in and out in time brings a sense of almost profound connection. I look up studios nearby and remind myself that no one will mind that I’m out of practise. But there is a need to commit.
To remove yourself from the status quo and set out to carve a life particular to yourself – two suburbs along, in a different city entirely, or on the other side of the world – requires a bravery and a sense of self-assurance. A sense of trust that at the other end of the great leap, there will be something far better than you could ever have planned. Having made the leap more than once, I now wonder how best to harness that same energy in the midst of the everyday mundane.
I walk from work to Carriageworks one evening. The sunsets are broad and expansive, stretching over Redfern like they did over Larrakia country during quarantine. There’s a warm orange-red light glowing out of an old warehouse window. I forgot how tree-lined Wilson Street is. Between the trees, the gloaming light, and Reko Rennie’s artwork rightly demanding we ‘REMEMBER ME,’ it feels like the most ruggedly true Australian street that I’ve experienced in a while. I’ve missed this part of town and vow to explore this side of Central in more depth, to walk the streets I once knew so well I could follow their paths in the space between waking and dreams.
‘It’s early May, and today brought with it the first hint that winter was around the corner.’
– Jessie Stephens, Heartsick
It feels strange to feel the change to autumn carried in the cooling air yet to not see it around me. In Sydney, so many of the trees are evergreen, not deciduous, and so the passage between seasons passes by in a blur. There’s no real distinct visual for autumn here, not like the jacaranda blooms that sing of spring. A disconnect between what we know is true – the passing of time, the shifting of seasons – and what we see. Here I am, disorientated by an autumn I once took for granted.
The temperature drops and dips in the evenings, remains crisp in the mornings. I’d forgotten the interior cold that comes from a lack of double-glazed windows and a lack of central heating. Instead, the chill seeps through the single-glazed glass, slides through the wooden slats of venetians and drifts over the bed covers, settling upon me. I layer blankets and quilts over a duvet, layer a jumper over pyjamas. A heater on the wall takes the edge and corners off the chill – helping a little but not a lot. I’d forgotten this.
One morning, fingertips and nose pink with the cold, I read about the improvements that could be made to Australian housing. How the lack of proper insulation means draughts are prominent, as is mould. It feels bizarre to be cold inside a city that, relatively speaking, isn’t very cold at all.
An hour later I look to the right, arms outstretched, from the vantage point of my yoga mat and spy the first blooms of mould sprawling across the inside of my bedroom window. I fetch the vinegar and wipe it down. This, again.
A friend’s birthday party falls on the night of the tense federal election. At 6pm someone notes that ‘the polls have closed’ and, one by one, phones begin to creep out of pockets and the news is refreshed before they’re slipped into pockets again – ‘far too early to say,’ we repeat to each other, shaking our heads at the lack of results and the continuation of suspense.
They thought it might take days – some seats ultimately do – or weeks for the results to be counted due to the abundance of postal votes. But by the middle of the evening, we have a concession speech, a victor, and a profound sense of relief amongst many.
In a country only recently wrecked by fire and in a year faced by flood after flood after flood, it feels galvanising to know that some sense of climate action might soon be on the horizon. Still, it’s hard not to fear that it will be far too little far too late. A decade lost and so much loss still to come because of it.
A friend comes over for dinner. I tell her I’ve started a new Sydney bucket list – a list of places to go and, let’s be honest, restaurants I want to try. Now that the weather has turned, the beaches of my newly-returned-to-Sydney list have become irrelevant.
We make plans together and she offers to make introductions to more of her friends and friends of friends and friend’s partners and so on the friendship group will grow. It feels good and nourishing and – hopeful. It seems to mark the beginning of feeling more like a local.
How lucky I am to be here, now, as life continues to unfurl.
‘The type of day that showed her where she ended, and the world began.’
– Sarah Winman, Still Life