I went to a wedding in Sydney when I was 12, arriving from the gloomy and windswept south-west coast of Victoria, and even though it was only two days I never forgot it. First time on a plane, first time eating poached salmon, first time realising people could actually live like this, drenched in sunlight, homes right on the cliffs, goldilocks weather where you could be in the ocean before work and on weekends go sailing.
2001
A few years after graduating, I moved north. I found a six-week sublet at an apartment in Paddington with a stranger and a job in recruiting, and thought I’d give my dream a shot.
Late summer and the air was warm and fragrant. In the dusk it would crackle with electricity and sudden, almost violent storms. The footpaths of Paddington were covered in skin-soft frangipani blossoms, like a wedding procession had just passed through, and the trees were full of strange, loud, colourful birds that we didn’t have down south.
Sydney – particularly in 2001 in its post-Olympics glow – was easy to fall in love with. I adored it all over again.
I presumed the sublet would be some featureless box but it was gorgeous – art deco with dark wood, and charming, strange-shaped rooms, looking out on to an enormous gum tree.
My new housemate was a formal young man in his early 20s. While I was dozing off on my first evening he came home from work, into my room and loomed above me in a dark suit, leaning on the handle of an expensive-looking umbrella, before sticking out a hand and introducing himself. Patrick.
We drank heavily at the Paddington Inn, spent all our money on imported Iranian seedless grapes at an upmarket grocer and made plans to one day make this six-week housemate arrangement more permanent.
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I had got lucky. Circles of friends expanded to include me. It didn’t matter that I had a job in recruiting that was hard to explain and boring, or that I went to parties with only the thinnest connection to anyone there. Along with the pleasant climate, an entire experience of ease was beginning to characterise my time in Sydney. It was all my 12-year-old self had dreamed of.
I stayed in Sydney, moving to Redfern. Summer gave way to the mildest of winters. The ease – the luck – continued. I sat an exam and did a range of interviews, and landed a highly sought-after position at Sydney Morning Herald as a trainee journalist. I met people there who would become lifelong friends. I found a vocation that would, in one form or another, stay with me for the rest of my life. And over the years in Sydney I also got lucky with houses (I even moved in with Patrick again, to a place in Potts Point). The homes were mostly by the water, in the east. And they were mostly cheap. When I had years of living precariously as a freelancer, or focused on writing books, somehow the city took care of me.
This luck – the ease – continued for such a long stretch that I thought it wouldn’t end, like riding a smooth, perfect wave that would never hit the shore.
This year I realised with a jolt that it had been 25 years since that first night in Paddington. It wasn’t totally unbroken. I had stints in Canberra, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Castlemaine and New York. But I always came back. If things didn’t work out in other places or I was spat out, Sydney was a bath that was always warm, that was always beckoning me to sink back in.
But when I booked a removalist and packed up the truck to head back down the Hume in June, the break felt different. The perfect wave had finally hit the shore, the bathwater had gone cold, the dream run had ended. It was over.
Joan Didion in her farewell letter to New York, Goodbye to All That, wrote: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
But I could see the end of my time in Sydney. It had arrived abruptly at dinner one night three months ago, at a friend’s house in Bronte. It was Holy Thursday and the email came in the middle of the meal. It was an official document on a government letterhead and forwarded by my real estate agent. Three months notice to vacate. I was being turfed. The owners wanted to move back in.
In 2026 can you be a freelance writer, living on one income, who is renting in a walkable Sydney neighbourhood? Not any more.
I looked around for new places but they were $200, $300, $400 a week more expensive than what I was paying. People told me the deal I’d had for the last five years was ridic, unreal, stuck in Covid-era pricing. I had not been in sync with the market and now I was.
Wake up! Wake up! The dream is over.
2021
When I first saw the apartment it had been empty for a while and the owners were prepared to drop the price. I moved in the day Sydney locked down for the second time.
The building was art deco with a charming row of letterboxes, a board with residents’ names and an attractive, sparkling foyer. The apartment itself had huge ceilings, thick walls, timber floorboards, an impractical bachelor’s kitchen with an ancient Kooka gas stove and tiles with native Australian animals. The building sat on the water’s edge, and a long window in the lounge room looked directly on to Sydney Harbour.
But the jewel in the crown of this apartment building was the harbour swimming pool.
The real estate agent had mentioned it as an afterthought – “Oh, there’s a harbour pool” – but it wound up being the prime attraction.
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I never even knew such a thing was possible, for buildings to have their own private harbour pools, but apparently there are 78 of them dotted around the harbour.
I loved living so close to the water. On still nights I could smell the salt and hear the water and the shouts from party boats. The next day small bags containing cocaine residue would wash up in the pool.
Some days friends would come over and we’d sit on a blanket, feet hanging off the harbour wall, drinking wine and watching golden hour.
Other mornings we got the paddleboard out and puttered around the bay. It was as though I was being let in on a Sydney secret. A whole new way of being in the city opened up.
The first two years, and the last year of my time in that apartment, I was a freelancer who worked from home (the years in between I worked in politics and moved between Sydney and Canberra, depending on sitting weeks).
Much of this freelance time, it felt as though I had won the lottery and retired, seeing out my days in this gorgeous resort, hanging out in the garden and in the pool, wandering down to the marina in Beare Park for coffee. Despite being quite broke in those shoulder years, living article by article, my lifestyle was of the super-rich. Idle hours – there I’d be at 2pm on sunny days, with a book and ice rattling around my cold-brew coffee in a glass tumbler.
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The area, including Potts Point and Kings Cross, had long been the home of writers and artists because of cheaper, smaller apartments, including lots of studios and one-bedroom places. By my last year there, things were changing.
Small apartments were being torn down to create large luxury apartment blocks, with a Potts Point Preservation Group report highlighting six current or proposed redevelopments in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Rushcutters Bay that would reduce the 209 existing apartments to just 85 – a 58% net loss of housing stock.
As I walked each day to the marina, the streets were increasingly filled with cranes and gaping holes where entire apartment blocks had once been. In their place, new blocks promised luxury living with house-sized floor space. Where would all the old residents go? Who could afford to live here except for the mega-rich?
It’s an old Sydney story that property is destiny – but destiny goes two ways. It can welcome you into the dream (you are 12 taking your first bite of poached salmon in Cammeray and realising that this could be your adult life) or throw you out of it.
By 2025 I had stopped feeling that the harbourside dream on a writer’s income was still possible in these traditionally bohemian pockets of Sydney and instead started to feel as though I had snuck in through the palace gates and was on borrowed time.
And I was.
I was born in Melbourne and spent my formative years – 18 to 24 – in the city in the 90s. Because I was young, those years seemed longer and more densely packed than the almost six years that have just passed in Elizabeth Bay. They were also some of the best years of my life. The city may have been ostensibly struggling then (there was an economic depression and a heroin epidemic) but, if you were very young, the edginess was the point. Everything was romantic.
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In those years we were obsessed with the photographs of Bill Henson. We could see ourselves and our city in them; moody winter light, enormous clouds tinged with gold, industrial landscapes, being young and in the darkness, merging with it somehow.
Now – decades later – in my first week back in Melbourne, I stayed with a former housemate from those years. She dropped me off at the station one morning on her way to the school run and I took the train to Flinders Street.
It was a still, foggy, grey morning and, as I stepped out, walking across the intersection through thin blades of cold, gold light, I suddenly felt a peculiar, not-unpleasant sensation. It was of time collapsing. The Sydney years were a dream and I was back there in the 90s, my friend, the station, the winter gloom, nothing changed – and everything was still romantic.
The time in between vanished like a spire in the fog, like a figure in a Henson portrait who disappears into the darkness at the centre of the frame. The sensation was vertiginous.
I was home. I had never left. The swimming pools, and bags of Iranian seedless grapes, and the schooners of beer at the Paddington Inn, and the nights on the 27th floor of the Sydney Morning Herald, watching the Balmain ferry pull into Darling Harbour, and the lockdown days swimming in the harbour pool, and all the books I wrote in that apartment, all those nights being lulled to sleep by the creak of boats by my window, seemed to have happened to a different person.
It was a dream, imagined by a 12-year-old girl.
