Home and away

I realized this morning that I have lived just a touch more of my adult life outside of Sydney than in it (assuming I was an adult at 18, which is debatable).

Other than our hometown, Graham and I have lived in Old Bar (Mid-North Coast, NSW), Perth (WA), Cambewarra (South Coast, NSW) and Dubai (UAE). In Sydney, we lived in four different homes, and spent most of our childhoods there, which means we have a fair breadth of diversity even within Sydney.

Most of the years that I have lived outside of Sydney I have not missed it for a second. That’s the city itself, of course. I have missed my loved ones who (inexplicably) continue to inhabit it. But I have not really missed Sydney town, per se. 

Yes, it has excellent coffee, but so do Perth and the South Coast. Yes, it has beautiful beaches, but so does the rest of the country. Yes, it has great shopping, but so does Dubai.

And in none of those places does it take 60 minutes to travel 10 kilometres at peak hour.

There doesn’t seem to be anything else in the world that makes my otherwise rather low blood pressure reach steam-out-the-ears point other than a Sydney traffic jam. That’s because the narrow, meandering roads were built for horses and carts in the mid-1800s and all the red tape in the state keeps them that way.

And the Spit Bridge is just too stupid to talk about.

But, until this year, I have always lived at visiting distance from Sydney, and maybe I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed reconnecting with special little bits of it from time to time. 

Now that I can’t, I know what they are. Here are three:

The harbour

Well, that’s obvious. For those who haven’t been there, it looks like this.

Now that's a harbour.

Every city should have one. Stunning, hurt the eyes, gob-smackingly beautiful. When I lived in Manly and travelled to work on the ferry, it was a daily blessing to suck in that salty air and enjoy one of the prettiest commutes in the world. I miss the slap of waves on creaky, old jetties, the cold, sandstone walls that line the harbour and even those pesky seagulls, noble rats of the air.

The parks

Makes you want to climb it, don't it?

I’m talking about the old parks, cunningly crafted into quirks of geography around waterways, or spread out majestically on prime land that in other cities would be full of highrise apartments. (As is often the case, the things we love about Sydney contribute to its dark side – if all the parks were full of buildings and modern roads, there’d be no traffic jams and a zero off the end of house prices. Oh well.) 

It’s the trees, particularly, that I miss. Oh my goodness, the trees. Those enormous, eminently climbable Morton Bay figs in the Botanical Gardens, which could house a family of tree-dwelling hippies with ease. And those stately, old-fashioned rows of date palms in Centennial Park. As a child, I thought date and canary island palms were Australian natives, they were such a feature of old parks and gardens in established suburbs of Sydney. Now that I live in the Middle East, I still get the occasional pang when one of them reminds me of home.

The magpies

This one is a little more personal, and very specific. No, I don’t miss the way the magpies swooped my head in spring. What I miss is the sound of magpies in the afternoon, particularly a late autumn afternoon. Maybe it’s rained, there’s a chill in the air. It’s that tender time of evening when the bruise of darkness is just beginning to bloom over the sky. The air smells of camellias and the damp crush of liquidambar leaves underfoot. I don’t know what they’re doing – calling each other home to bed? – but the magpies sing this warbling, ecstatic song for half an hour or so that is better than Mozart. Wherever else I’ve lived in Australia, it is not the same. It’s a very Sydney moment. 

Sob!

What do you love about your hometown?