Many of the shots were taken up on the roof of the building in the city, looking south over the suburbs, through the smoke haze, and from a height of a few hundred feet. Each one is nondescript. Like a series of stills from a boring TV show, ruined even more by snow on the screen. But one time I stood in a half completed office block in the plant room at sunset. The internal space was as big as a large picture theatre and had 12-foot ducts winding about it. Looking west across the harbour towards where I lived and beyond for miles, to the edge of the city in the west. The water was golden. You had to be touched by the scale of the city, by the feeling of thousands of activities, by the industry, the smoke, by the harbour and the boats. The year Sydney became a city, the year of uncontrolled land speculation and overseas investment in towers to remain empty for 20 years. The year to see a hundred cranes on the skyline. For the first time a feeling we are living in a city like they do in England, Europe, America. We could relax.

And now, such sadness.

Hello, how are you. Haven’t heard from you for a long time but I imagine you aren’t actually avoiding me. Things have been amazing here too, though more in that mad sort of way. Everyone’s very depressed. I won’t bore you with a why or wherefore, not because I don’t want to, but because I really don’t know why. It’s as though it’s been put in the water supply, all-pervasive and mysterious. Whenever you go to speak to someone about how bad you feel, they say, My god I’m depressed. Are you too? Yeah, what a year. But it’s supposed to be a good year, the year of the serpent. The Chinese think serpents are ok, maybe they’re not so good for westerners. I think I feel trapped by circumstance or circumstances, lots of them. That’s the horrible thing, whenever you think about just one of the dreadful things happening to you, it seems only a part of it, you can hardly pinpoint something long enough to attack it. They’re on all sides. Paranoia flourishes. Oh, why don’t you think of coming back, don’t I make you homesick?

The tail lights of a car are speeding away. Malcolm Fraser is still in power. It’s the year of the serpent. A good year hut a year of looking back and reviving rock and roll. Maybe there’s a cycle and we’re in for yet more sadness. The countryside looks unreal, we can’t look at it now and think, Peace and Love, we only think, Once I looked at the countryside and thought, Yes, Peace and Love. We look at the sunset and remember that we used to say, Look at the sunset.

The red tail lights of another car are speeding away. We are on an expressway. It

is beautiful at night, black. The dash light is reflected in the windscreen, round and pearly. The speedo has never worked and the number of miles registered is 0000000. We are playing tapes of old rock and roll numbers.