I moved around a few times when I was little. My first home was in a small village in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, famous for its wine and infamous for its bushfires. Wollombi only had a few hundred residents and I used to run naked and barefoot down the main street. From ages five until 10 I lived in Balmain, a waterside suburb of Sydney, where I could no longer roam naked and was told off if I walked without shoes on the sand, as the heroin epidemic of the 1990s meant that used syringes often washed up on the shore. When I was 10, we moved permanently to a 20-acre property that was 15km out of Bellingen, a town in the rainforest of Northern New South Wales. I stayed there until I was 19, when I finished high school and moved back to Sydney because I got an equity scholarship to a university there.
I’ve always considered myself to be a country girl, even though I spent a few preliminary years in the city, because the majority of my youth was spent in the country with all the chores of the country, feeding the chooks and horses in the morning and coming home from school to check the cows’ water trough and light the fire. I listened to an interview with American rapper Saucy Santana recently in which he said “Florida raised me”, even though he only moved there at 10 years old. I feel the same about Bellingen, that it raised me, and my years in Wollombi and Balmain shrink and pale in comparison. If I’m asked where I’m from, Bellingen is the place I’ll always mention, unless I’m with non-Australians, and then I’ll give my current location of Sydney.
Part of my affinity for country music, besides it being the soundtrack of my childhood, is how grounded it is in and nostalgic for place. Listening to the podcast Dolly Parton’s America I related to Lebanese American doctor Naji Abumrad speaking about how Dolly’s music took him back to his childhood home, in the mountains of Lebanon; I also picture my own country home, beneath Dorrigo Mountain, when she sings “My Tennessee Mountain Home”. As Australian country singer Kasey Chambers says, “how you grow up is something you never lose inside yourself.”
While my dad still lives up where I’m from, and so I still have a foot remaining there, I’ve been living in the city for 14 years now—all of my adult life. I feel at home here, too. I know the city the way only a driver can, I know its rhythms and secrets, when to avoid certain arteries and which hidden veins take me from here to there.
I have traversed this city widely because of my work, taking me to all different suburbs and into different homes. I read a piece by Amsterdam-based writer Aaron Schuster recently in which he said, “it’s almost as if one needed the perspective of the sex worker to grasp the true beauty of urban space,” and that line has stayed with me. It’s through sex work and nightlife that this city has really come to feel like it belongs to me, and me to it—it hasn’t been a passive absorption or exchange.
Just being immersed in and surrounded by nature was enough to imprint it on me, but my relationship with the metropolis was more actively built through memories of toil and fun. That is, except for the parts of the city most emblematic of the country; those touch me effortlessly—jacarandas in bloom, flocks of birds and ferns coated in dust.
