All that land and all that water

I returned to England yesterday, after two weeks spent back in Australia, visiting friends and family with Matthias. I spent most of that time in Sydney, staying with my mum, although I made a flying visit to Macedon (in rural Victoria), where my dad, stepmother and three youngest sisters have recently moved.

It's hard for me to really capture the emotions that I feel whenever I go back to Australia. My trips back there are at once an exercise in nostalgia (dashing around eating, drinking and doing all the things I can't eat, drink or do in the UK) and a stark reminder of the passage of time, of change, of loss, of the person I could have been, had I stayed. This time the reminder was even more tangible: my grandmother was alive the last time I visited; my friends have babies who did not exist the last time I was there; shops and restaurants that had stood for years in various suburbs of eastern Sydney have closed or moved to new locations, disorienting me. I always feel both less like myself, and more like an earlier version of myself, whenever I go back. I always feel like the space I used to occupy has closed up behind me, and is unreachable. I always get that little voice pointing out the things I miss about Australia (the sea, the beaches, the food and coffee culture without the sneery accusations of pretentiousness and snobbery that seem to be levelled at anyone who cares about food in the UK, my close-knit, matriarchal family, the birdsong, the sense of common childhood cultural references), accompanied with the certainty that I was right to leave and that I never, never want to live there permanently again. I always have fun when I visit, but every visit is bittersweet. That's probably the simplest way to explain what it feels like to return.

It was bakingly hot -- over 30 degrees Celcius most days (although the nights in Macedon were freezing), and I swam almost every day, twice in eastern Sydney beaches (Bronte and Clovelly), and the rest of the time doing laps with my mother and one of my aunts in Boy Charlton outdoor pool. This is a saltwater pool located in a beautiful part of Sydney Harbour. Two of its walls are completely transparent, so you have the impression of actually swimming in the harbour itself, and it's a lovely place to swim. I was out of practice, but managed to build up to swimming a kilometre after two days. My mother and aunt (both in their sixties) were faster than I was, though! Here's a photoset I took of the pool, to give you some idea of what it's like.

I could not stop photographing the sea and the sky. suzemetherell, who has just returned to Australia after several years in London, told me she was exactly the same when she first got back: Britain is good at vivid green colours, but its blues leave a lot to be desired. Here are some of my sea/sky photos:

Sydney Harbour as seen from the roof of my mum's block of flats
Sydney Harbour as seen from the balcony of my aunt's flat
The trees in the early morning, outside my dad's house in Macedon
A photoset of burning blue skies and gum trees in Castlemain, an old mining town near Macedon
A photoset taken in Rushcutters Bay, where I met with my Sydney friends for a picnic
Rough waters at Bronte, taken from the Bondi to Coogee cliff walk
Waves rolling in at Clovelly
The sunset over Sydney Harbour, taken during a party with my family on the roof of Mum's block of flats

You get the idea.

As well as catching up with friends and family, and hurling myself into any available water at every opportunity, I read a lot, went to a bunch of craft beer bars with Matthias (I don't drink beer, but he does, and always looks up new places to visit whenever we're on holiday), and took advantage of the fact that my mum lives a short walk away from all the main sports stadiums in Sydney to watch a football (i.e. soccer) match.

It was wonderful in particular to hang out with my three youngest sisters, who I don't see all that much as they're still children and can't travel overseas very easily. My youngest sister, three-year-old Maud, is obsessed with painting and drawing, and spent one evening drawing portraits of everyone in the house. The picture she drew of me was apparently the first picture she'd ever drawn of a person, and I love it to bits. The last time I'd seen her, she was only one-and-a-half, and couldn't really talk, so it was amazing to actually be able to have a conversation with her, and just hang out with her and my other sisters.

The trip was, as always, too short, but I'm glad I went. It's always a very emotional experience for me, going back, but those connections and roots are important to me, and every time I return to Australia I feel them being strengthened and reaffirmed. I'm someone who has a very strong sense of place, of my past, of the landscapes of memory and how they have shaped me, and although I find it confronting, I also feel it's necessary and essential that I return to them and keep them a part of my life.

By a strange coincidence, the Guardian has been running a series on Australian cities. I'll leave you with some links to the pieces in that series that I found most resonant and/or interesting:

The radical plan to split Sydney into three (I'm not entirely convinced, and I think the planners' attempts to connect their proposed division of Sydney with Indigenous ways of demarcating and dividing the region to be disigenuous and appropriative)

The best in the world: a love letter to Australia's public swimming pools (one of the pools mentioned, Boy Charlton, is the place where I swam all my laps during this recent Sydney trip, and, incidentally, I have swum in literally every Sydney pool mentioned in the article)

First Dog on the Moon's guide to Australia's urban stereotypes (This is a cartoon, and is painfully true. I'm a weird kind of Sydney-Canberra hybrid - I grew up in Canberra, and moved to Sydney when I was 18, and always felt like a Canberran when I lived there, faintly horrified by the conspicuous consumption, obessession with real estate, and over-the-top concern with physical appearance, while always feeling somewhat dowdy, staid and suburban in comparison - and let me tell you, this cartoon gets Canberra and Sydney stereotypes spot on)