Wherever you are, you’re there

I love Sydney. I was born there, grew up there, and lived there until I was in my very late 20s. It’s home.

Since then I’ve lived in places as far removed and different as the West Midlands, UK, Perth, Western Australia and Los Angeles, California, but part of the appeal of putting down roots elsewhere was that whenever I travelled back to Sydney to see friends and extended family, it was the relieved exhaled breath of returning to where you came from. I hope we’re all lucky enough to feel that if we were happy and well provided for while we grew.

Not coincidentally, Sydney is also home to the inimitable Sydney Harbour Bridge, so writing Falling in and around Sydney was a practical as well as a spiritual undertaking. It’s a story very much anchored to a place and (to a slightly lesser extent) a time.

When I started writing the first draft, all I had to go on when it came to city geography was a large map from the NSW state automobile club association, the NRMA. I often refer to my having started writing in the pre-web era, but I actually began Falling the year CERN released the web to the public – 1991 – it’s just that the general population wouldn’t be using it for a couple of years hence.

So in most cases the houses, offices and buildings where characters lived and worked were picked out on a map and described completely from my imagination.

I say ‘most’ because some of them are places I know. I grew up in the Sutherland Shire, the southernmost local government region of the Sydney metropolitan area. Driving to the inner city means going through the St George area, either the main thoroughfare of the Princes Highway (which ultimately leads to Melbourne in the other direction) through Kogarah and Rockdale or the oceanside road of The Grand Parade through Brighton Le Sands.

Even decades back, a good way to avoid the occasionally-horrific Grand Parade traffic was by going a few blocks back from the beach along Chuter Avenue, and it’s there you’ll find a block of flats on the corner of Ramsgate Road.

After driving past it for a couple of years I decided the flat on the corner of the top floor would be Dale’s place. His fictional place of work at the time of the bridge’s catastrophic collapse was housed in the very building I worked in back then at 100 Miller Street, North Sydney, currently (as it was then) home to one of the administrative centres of MLC Insurance.

Barry Paul, Dale’s doctor and one of the heroes of the story, occupied a house I lived nearby in the 1990s, one that had what I perceived to be a slightly commanding presence (much like his character).

That’s in the suburb of Menai, but I actually situated it on a culdesac leading off Attunga Road, the arterial street that goes down into the Yowie Bay peninsula from The Shire’s east/west main roads of The Kingsway and President Ave. It’s an area I knew well at the time because several friends from my school years had lived around there.

I didn’t know who lived in the Menai house I assigned to Barry and his wife so I never went inside, but the front view inspired my description of the inside.

Of course, it only ended up being Barry’s place after the LMR. Originally a lot of what his character endured was attributed to Albert, the government fixer whose role in the story was reduced when a critique partner pointed out the two characters were doing a lot of the same things and could be amalgamated.

Barry’s surgery was also easy to situate. Urunga Parade, a short street in the shadow of Miranda Westfield just up the road from the train station, has several small office complexes populated by doctors to this day, so I simply plonked him there.

But there are plenty more addresses in Falling I had no idea about from real life. Tim Hacker lives and works from his house in Rozelle and has an office to receive clients and visitors in a small streetside professional complex in Birchgrove. A work colleague lived in Rozelle and a few of us gathered at her place for a social event once but as far as I know I’ve never set foot in Birchgrove in my life.

Metallurgist Donald Chin-Hsei Lambert lives in Glebe (although it never comes up in the story) and works at the University of Sydney in Camperdown, where City Road and Parramatta Road meet.

But it was Vicki’s place that made me first realise I could use the internet to accurately describe places I’d been imagining. She works in an office tower in Bondi Junction but I never figured out or imagined which one, firstly because I’ve never been very familiar with the eastern suburbs, but secondly because if you look at how busy and built up it is along the main road of Oxford Street you could take your pick.

But her house in Woollahra was a bigger deal because I describe it in the story very specifically, as if you were arriving and entering it yourself. The mind’s eye looks over the line of shrubbery at the front, the yard, the wide frontage, the central stairway inside and the rooms and living areas either side of it, eventually reaching the back corner dining area where Dale and Vicki are having sumptuous morning sex.

I figured out the address from a street directory or something (the NRMA map wasn’t that detailed), and over several years of rewrites the visual of the house in my mind became inextricably fixed to it.

So the problem came when I looked it up on Google street view years later to find it was (naturally) nothing like the house I described. It’s actually a small federation-era cottage.

In fact you can’t even replicate the above image anymore – the Google data has updated and if you check now, the camera car evidently hasn’t gone far enough down the street to capture it from directly in front like I did originally (and look how much the trees have grown, to give you an idea how long it’s been since I took the first screenshot).

But it meant I had to rewrite the sequence leading up to Dale and Vicki’s sex scene to account for what I imagined was a very different (and much smaller) floor plan inside.

That’s all a way of describing a phenomenon I’ve found in writing that seems obvious but actually has a deeper aesthetic impact. It’s easier to write about a place or a thing when you know it, have been there or have at least seen it virtually because the knowledge from doing so somehow finds its way into the text.

When you know rather than just dreaming it up, the words somehow have more authority, maybe only to you as the author, so descriptions will be conveyed better thanks to your subconscious confidence in what you’re saying – even if only subtextually.

A good example is the time I got halfway through a novel and stopped because I was describing a city I’d never visited – I just didn’t believe any of my attempts to enmesh the visual profile and social culture into the narrative.

So when I got the opportunity (after a job retrenchment), I went there. Life got in the way and the novel is still half finished, but if I ever pick it up again I’ll have more confidence because I’ll know what I’m talking about.

Falling found its strongest expression of that in the research trip Tim and a handful of colleagues take to a farm in Wilberforce in the far west to investigate reports of paranormal phenomena.

I can’t even remember if I originally gave the property a specific address from the real world, but the words I used to describe a narrow gully along the fenceline and unused commonwealth land beyond conveyed (to me, at least) a sense that he and his colleagues were on the knife edge of a yawning abyss, that there was nothing beyond except kilometres of low scrub and eventually the endless desert interior of the country.

When I came to rewrite the Wilberforce set piece to include geographic reality much later, I realised how badly I’d tripped up in wanting to include that creepy feeling of being on the edge of nothing.

Maybe that area really was the last post of civilisation if you drove west out of Sydney back in the early 90s, but I actually don’t think so – it’s just north and just east of the fairly major localities of Windsor and Richmond.

I can’t remember now why I didn’t just relocate it somewhere that does seem to be the last outpost of the outlying suburbs like Kurrajong Heights or Grose Vale, but if I did I’d also be ignoring the basic geography of the Sydney basin.

There’s nowhere for hundreds of kilometres north or south where the metropolitan area does actually open into wide open scrub and desert – Sydney and its surrounds are hemmed in by the thick bush of the Blue Mountains.

But I couldn’t write about that crushingly lonely, dark-side-of-the-moon quality with any confidence anymore. In fact I had to mention how the Hawkesbury River was just nearby and Richmond Air Force Base was just a few kilometres away.

All of which means I like to think Falling has something of the spirit of the place it’s set – or at least the little pockets of it where the characters live, love, work and die – because either I lived and worked in them myself or have seen them virtually and know enough about the cultural lifeblood of a city to describe the social and professional goings-on there realistically.