The brief to ‘write about the city you live in’ has produced diverse books by five Australian writers. Meanjin editor Sally Heath conducts an email conversation with Peter Timms (In Search of Hobart), Matthew Condon (Brisbane), Delia Falconer (Sydney), Sophie Cunningham (Melbourne) and Kerryn Goldsworthy (Adelaide).

SALLY HEATH: How did you arrive at the tone you finally used in the book?

Peter Timms: As a newcomer, it was important that I didn’t come across as a know-all. Tasmanians are very sensitive about people from elsewhere presuming to encroach on their territory. So it was necessary always to adopt the voice of the interested, sympathetic outsider, opinionated but aware of sensitivities and deferential to the opinions of others with more experience of the city. This is why I based the book around interviews with local business people, artists, politicians and others. They gave me a springboard from which to launch my own observations. They also provide a range of voices, which gives the book more texture.

Kerryn Goldsworthy: I was inspired by a novel that arrived one day in a package of books for review. I have long forgotten the title but I remember the general idea of it vividly. It called itself a novel and was the story of a romance, but it was really what I’d call a curated relationship: it took the form of an exhibition catalogue, in which various artefacts and memorabilia from the relationship – theatre tickets, a jacket worn on a first date, a loaned book, a special wine glass – were photographed and appeared with gallery-type notes under them explaining their import, adding up to the whole story of what Paul Simon calls ‘the arc of a love affair’. It occurred to me that this would be a great way to do the Adelaide book: to choose iconic or numinous objects that seemed to resonate with meaning and to write a sort of meditative essay about each one, using it as a focus for different stories and ideas about the city.

Sophie Cunningham: Watching how Melbourne was being reduced by drought was a bit like watching it die of thirst. Then Black Saturday struck in early February 2009. Standing in my street on a 47-degree day, surrounded by a row of Victorian houses that had heated up like ovens, brought home to me that Melbourne was a city that had been built on European principles. It was obvious that its way of imagining itself was going to have to change if the city was going to survive the challenges of climate change and population growth over the next forty years. That terrible day became the opening of the book and once that decision was made I chose to run with the idea of Melbourne as a city ruled by weather, even if – or especially because – the joke that it always rained was so dated.

SALLY HEATH: What elements of the cities revealed themselves?

Matthew Condon: I used the opportunity in the writing to revisit many of the stories and myths I had heard and remembered from childhood. I deliberately drilled down into the Indigenous history of the city, and also looked in depth at the early settlement and its function as a penal colony. The aggression of Brisbane interested me, founded as it was on violence. I wanted to see if violence is in the DNA of a city; how that might have shaped, and continued to shape, the city’s inhabitants. My investigations revealed a plethora of eccentric, quixotic characters throughout the city’s history. One of the abiding themes of the book, however, is this disregard for history and the past and especially lessons learnt from the past.

Peter Timms: What most surprised me was the extent of disadvantage in Hobart. I’d read the statistics, but hadn’t really experienced it. One tends to stick to the areas one knows, which, in my case, were the relatively well-off suburbs of Sandy Bay, Battery Point, West Hobart and North Hobart. I just drove past the poorer areas without really taking much notice. Researching the book meant spending some time in these neighbourhoods, wandering around, going to garage sales and open houses, engaging people in conversation. It was an eye-opener.

Delia Falconer: I was struck very forcefully by historian Grace Karskens’ work on the make-up of the early English population of this city. I loved her description of how many convicts, unlike their Georgian captors, could be more accurately thought of as citizens of a pre-industrial age: many rural or working-class prisoners were steeped in pre-modern patterns of time and behaviour (a distrust of government, a cyclical and seasonal sense of time and consequent patterns of rest and work). This had never occurred to me before. Not only did Sydney’s Indigenous history long predate colonisation; the colonisers’ history (or histories) had deep roots before 1788. This captured an instinctive sense of antipathy I had always felt towards the snobbish European truism that we were (and still are) such a ‘young’ and callow city.

DELIA FALCONER: Another question for the writers. Was there anything you wanted not to write about? And how did you decide what to leave out?

Kerryn Goldsworthy: After giving it a lot of thought, I made a considered decision not to put any emphasis on the sociological aspects of Adelaide’s depressed outer northern suburbs, which was the crucible of the so-called Bodies in the Barrels serial murders and which is an ongoing problem in a post-industrial landscape – the whole city of Elizabeth, the centre of that region, was established in the first instance specifically as an industrial base in the 1950s. The main reason for that decision was that I think the people who live there get quite stigmatised enough without any help from me. And in any case it’s not really that kind of book. I have tried throughout to maintain an awareness of various social justice issues in Adelaide and how they get played out, and that’s woven into the different chapters in different ways.

Delia Falconer: One difficulty intrinsic to this project was that Sydney is such an international tourist destination, filled with icons that are recognised around the world. In a sense, the more these are photographed and celebrated, the less local meaning they hold. I had a very strong feeling that I didn’t want to spend too much time, if any, writing about the Harbour Bridge or Opera House, for example. My sense was that Sydney quite likes to hide itself behind these clichés, almost as a way of secreting away its inner life. And it was this inner life, beneath the facade, that I wanted to explore. This decision led to an interesting line of thought, which was that Sydneysiders’ relationship to the city’s natural beauty and easy access to leisure read differently from inside than outside. That is, while Sydney’s enjoyment of sun and surf is seen as mindless by those who don’t live here, it can have a quite spiritual dimension for those who do. And I realise I’ve also just answered my next question ...

DELIA FALCONER: Was there a particular ‘idea’ outsiders might have about your city that you were aware of, and wanted to confirm, deny or complicate?

Matthew Condon: The commonality of people’s remembrances of Brisbane, or their Brisbane, is how expatriates all lean towards this childhood Eden. It is a place that, at a distance, can I think be over-remembered. The vegetation is always lusher; the light always fantastic; the innocence overwhelming. There is something about Brisbane and the hold it takes on its children. It’s as if, for a moment, it offered perfection. And I think Brisbane-born people spend a lifetime trying to get back to that moment.

This is an abridged version of an article originally published by Meanjin http://meanjin.com.au/.