I grew up in Sydney but I find it a difficult place to write about. It’s too slippery, its endless redevelopments bound up with my own youth and the way I left, pushed out by the mad expense of life there. The person I was in Sydney was like some of the houses I lived in: slated for demolition. I loved getting lost in its streets and escaping to its close ring of bushland and I hated its choking class distinctions, the imprisonment of its postcodes, its obsession with self-improvement.

Maybe the city’s need for transformation is linked to the way the harbour flushes itself, constantly exchanging water with the ocean – a phenomenon of tides and wind and landscape that keeps its aquatic ecosystem thriving. Maybe it’s the layered wishes of generations of migrants, or a response to a history of violent displacement. Whatever it is, the people I know there seem to hit refresh a lot. And every time I go back to the city, its built environment has radically changed – always more freeways, more demolitions, more aspirational glass.