Excursion and Excavation

A tyre floats like a halo above the Princes Highway. It is one of those corners of the city where time is trapped and stratified: how long it took for the paint to fade, the tree to grow, the chimneys to blacken.

Across the highway the park’s green slopes absorb our footsteps. The sky is big here and criss-crossed by the planes which skim over the city, coming here only to leave again.

The ominous feeling of impending change, undercutting the details of the present.

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This month on Mirror Sydney, an excursion beyond the borders of this blog, to a story I wrote for the Sydney Review of Books: please click on through to Excavating St Peters.

This is part of a series of essays of Sydney and NSW regional places the Sydney Review of Books are publishing called Writing NSW. I’ll be speaking at an event at Bankstown Arts Centre associated with this on November 12th, New Geographies. I’ll be speaking about haunting and the urban landscape with Peter Doyle, Anwen Crawford, and Mark Mordue.

Even since this essay was published, things have changed in St Peters. Follow the Westconnex Action Group for updates on the Westconnex monster.

You can also hear me, Sydney Review of Books editor Catriona Menzies-Pike, and writer Suneeta Peres da Costa talking about the series on RN Books and Arts.

 

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