A Year in the City

A Year in the City Benjamin Peek Doctor of Philosophy. 2006 Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 2 Acknowledgements. It is said that you pay your debts to people in the front of books by mentioning them, and so it must be the same with a thesis. By far the greatest debt I owe is to that of my supervisor, Anne Brewster. Without her valued input and time on this project of mine, it would have been a very different and lesser thing. In addition, I owe a huge debt to Bruce Johnson, Christine Gregory, Cat Sparks, Deborah Biancotti, and Paul Dawson. Each read early drafts of the work and gave me invaluable feedback. Likewise, I wish to show gratitude to my mother and to my friends, Jason Vella, Darrell Barton, and Lindsay Craig, all who offered support to me in various different ways while writing this thing. Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone who found themselves caught up in the project, and didn’t resist it. Thanks to all. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 3 Parts of this thesis have been published in different and earlier forms: ‘The Dreaming City,’ a different version of ‘The Dreaming City, Part One’, was published in the anthology, Leviathan Four: Cities, edited by Forrest Aguirre in 2004, by Ministry of Whimsy Press, a imprint of Nighshade Books. The story was reprinted in 2005 in The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume 1, edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt. The book was published in Australia by MirrorDanse Books, and in the United States by Prime Books. ‘Adala’s Memory: A March Collection’, an earlier version of ‘The Woman Who Wasn’t There’, was published in the online collection, Spiny Babbler, edited by Brian Dibble and Kelly Pilgrim, 2005. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 4 Contents. 1. A Year in the City – 4. 2. A Dissertation to A Year in the City – 262. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 5 A Year in the City. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 6 "'It is beautiful, of course it's beautiful--the harbour; but that isn't all of it, it's only half of it; Sydney's the other half, and it takes both of them to ring the supremacy-bell. God made the harbour and that's all right; but Satan made Sydney.'" —Mark Twain. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 7 J, This is yours. There are a few notes through it, which I’d be grateful if you could remove, or fix, as you see fit. I’ve no idea what to do with the book now and I suppose that it doesn’t much matter. It’s done. You can only be obsessed with a city and a life for so long. B. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 8 Postcards from the Red Dawn Card One. (Rugged sandy yellow cliffs drop into an ocean that churns before it. Like stone guards, they suggest that there is no break in the wall, no way of gaining entry through the wall that, on the card, stretches from bent edge to bent edge.) Dear Mum—1 There is no paper to write on in this apartment except stacks of postcards that Aunt Jean has collected and kept wrapped in thick red elastic bands.2 I’ve counted thirty piles, but find more every day. Each pile has (I suspect) a hundred or so cards, arranged in no particular order. I figure she won’t miss the ones I’m using, but I’ll replace them before Linds and I leave in six months so that you don’t get one of her obsessive and pointless phone calls about how her postcard collection has been ruined. At any rate, we should have net access up and running by the time these cards arrive, anyway, but the jet lag is awful, and there’s nothing on the telly here at four thirty in the morning. 1 b. 1948, Manchester, England, UK. Karen Thompson’s (Mamwell) parents left England when she was seven and immigrated to Sydney, Australia, as five-pound migrants. On the first night in the huge, gunmetal steamship, the young girl slept in a crowded cabin beneath sea level and dreamed that she had been swallowed into the belly of a beast. She would grow into adulthood surrounded by white bones and red organs. In her dream, she broke the bones into spears and, with the red organs behind her, ruled over everything that fell into her new world. She was the princess. The only princess. But upon arriving in Sydney, her parents discovered that the life they had been told that waited for them by Karen’s aunt was a lie, and her father’s trade was now unrecognized. They moved into a tiny room at the back of her aunt’s sandwich shop and, quietly, began to plot their escape, which took five years. 2 b. 1952, Manchester, England, UK. Since arriving in Sydney in 1978, Jean Dodgson (Mamwell), the younger sister of Karen Thompson, has purchased 2, 385 postcards and never written a single word upon one. “I am not here on holiday,” she once told a friend. Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 9 This first card shows the entrance to Sydney Harbor. Did it look like this in 1955? Love, Martin. Card Two. (Bondi Beach. A pair of red and yellow flags jut out of smooth, empty sand, while in the right foreground corner, the white wooden leg of a lifesaver’s perch sits. Looking out, the ocean is smooth and calm, as if it, and the flags and the lifesaver, are simply waiting for people to arrive.) Aunt Jean’s apartment looks out over Sydney Harbor. After getting in yesterday, Linds and I sat on the balcony, drank cold Australian beer, and watched the sun set from behind it, with the lumbering ferries moving through the bright ocean, the ridged top of the Opera House flaring out, and the arc of what we’re told are the Rocks stretching out into bays. Directly below us, traffic patterns the bridge, and has done since we’ve got here. It is the Bridge that links the land that has been divided by the long, winding scar that the Harbor has cut through the middle of the city. Linds and I figure that, as soon as the shops are open, we will head in and do a bit of shopping. Aunt Jean only has a bookshelf of bibles, all of them referenced with yellow and pink post-it notes. An obsessive hobby for an agnostic, but not the kind of thing to read when your brain is fried. So I’m dying for a book I can read, and Linds wants a toothbrush that doesn’t look like it’s been used to squash things. I married too fussy a girl.3 3 b. 1980, Killarney, Ireland, UK. Lindsay Thompson, originally having the last name Craig, had been born into a large family that did not, under any circumstance outside funerals and marriages, travel; at which case, it must be said, that everyone they knew lived in Killarney, so they did not need to travel for either of these circumstances. The Craig family liked to know where they were. They had a strong sense of place, bred into them with generations upon Benjamin Peek – A Year in the City. 1 Martin. Card Three. (Sydney Harbour at dusk. The sky is a vibrant orange and the bridge an intricate shadow puppet formed by hands.) Since our arrival, we have had two conversations with Sydneysiders. Both have been about property. The first was with a tall Asian girl about my age, and the second a fat, white man. Both talked about the history of land development here and price climbs and each told us, with an assuring and assured white teeth smile, that Aunt Jean’s apartment is worth a small fortune, should she wish to sell. Both paused, as if waiting for us to say, perhaps, that “Jean is dead, and we’re the family, here to make a quick bob on her stuff.” Linds joked that they would probably rob us, if they thought they could get away with the apartment. I suppose it’s hardly surprising in a country where land has been a commodity from the start. On the plane in, a Greek woman, about thirty five, thirty six, told us that if we walked round the Botanical Gardens, we would find dozens of men and women who were there, not to enjoy the empty, bright sky, or the fresh breeze, but to hunt for property. She said that they go there to examine from afar, perched with price guides in their hands, professional hunters, generations that did not travel. And so it was that they looked upon their wandering sister/daughter/granddaughter/niece/cousin, who bought books of other countries with birthday money before she could drive, with a deep sense of confusion. But on her sixteenth birthday, her father, Henry, took her photo in passport size, and helped her fill in the paper work, while also photographing and filling in one for himself. It was true, he said later, that he had never wanted to visit the States, and it was true, he added to his wife, Noreen, as they lay in bed, that he would never return to the place. But he said it quietly and in the dark so his daughter couldn’t hear.

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