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ARTS AND CULTURE

Grounded

  • 20 April 2020
This morning I awoke to the distant sound of an aircraft skimming across the city. It jolted me into wakefulness, this noise pollution seeping slowly into my consciousness. Where is this beast headed, I wondered, and what is it carrying within its cold metal belly?

So rapidly have I adapted to this surreal existence in which we now find ourselves, the sound which was once an inseparable part of my morning routine — jets announcing the dawn as they droned overhead — has now become disturbingly anachronistic. It was me who once occupied the belly of those now mostly grounded beasts as they flew low over leafy suburbs, the former me who spent my life leaving home and returning, leaving home and returning from journeys in which I crisscrossed the globe many times over.

Sinking low over Sydney, I’d peer out of the plane window at the emerald cloud arising to meet me (it was no good at night, of course, for the city is transformed into an unintelligible disco spangle of light and dark once the sun goes down). From this fleeting perspective, I’d try to map my position according to my memory of this city: here is the artery coursing through its suburbs and piercing the CBD’s heart like an arrow; there are the ovals on which my children once played and the office clusters and concrete parking lots and the beachside shabby chic shacks splashed by the Pacific Ocean; and here are the creeks meandering like green-bellied snakes through suburban neighbourhoods and that ceaseless bushland — so menacingly close to the suburbs at any moment now it will open its maw and swallow them whole.

Thrilling though my travel to foreign lands had been, it was my own city which inspired in me the deepest sense of longing and connection — reconnection — each time I sunk back down into it. Every landing was soft, every welcome warm and familiar. I was seeing this place with newly appreciative eyes: the people’s expressions were explicable, the currency logical, the coffee shops easy to locate and the public transport a breeze to navigate.

Perhaps this is why I find myself — in these early days of lockdown, at least — surprisingly bereft of wanderlust, though I’ve made a career from it. Serendipitously, I had decided at the end of last year to voluntarily ground myself for the first quarter
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