Beyond Sydney’s mad mouse wheel – its cost-of-living crisis, infrastructure rush and undimmed lust for international air travel at a time of climate collapse – lie pockets of normalcy where mysterious velvety-winged brethren, seasonal visitors from afar, go quietly about their business … resting and recovering between flights, taxiing and refuelling … on our kitchen sink. The capacious sink/runway was salvaged in 1990 from an upper-level laboratory of the deco-styled Maritime Services Board building on Circular Quay (today the MCA). Its deeply-patinaed stainless steel exhudes a quiet weight of lived-in scars, dents & scratches, somehow comforting in their anonymity, their unknown [human & more-than-human] history.
Last autumn I pulled apart a couple of damp old decking boards I’d been storing for firewood to reveal a portentous landscape drawn by nature itself.