One of the advantages of living 10,000 miles from home is that you get to revisit your home city every so often, and each time it’s through different eyes. When I left Sydney in 2009, it was with eagerness. having come out of a particularly bad relationship, and entering into a new one that was full of hope, I felt light. Unburdened by the friendships and history that I lost as a result of unfounded accusations. The only thing I was leaving behind was family; the connection with whom was often strengthened through distance anyway.¹

Each time I’ve returned to Sydney, I’ve been a different person, and as a result, have been able to view the city and the people I know there through different eyes. I first returned in 2011, not two years after I left. The occasion was my honeymoon and to celebrate my recent marriage with our Australian friends and family who couldn’t join us in the UK the previous month. Having come from the UK, a country that is so densely packed with people that the entire population of it’s capitol city outstrips the population of my home state, into which the entirety of the UK can fit into with room to spare, Sydney felt small, almost trivial.² I’ll be honest and say that I felt a superiority, bordering on arrogance, about my new home, and felt that Sydney had become a holiday destination, but nothing more.

The next time I returned to Sydney was Christmas of the same year. Having already experienced two Christmases abroad with Emily’s family, who had schooled me on what a Dickensian Christmas should be, I was keen to show Emily what Christmas was like in Australia. Christmas is the one time of year when I feel the strongest pull toward family, as one might expect, and while experiencing Christmas abroad is an adventure, it also weighs the event with a certain melancholy when you can’t be with family. This also spanned into an adventure of sorts when a planned few days in a small coastal town turned into an impromptu two week road trip up the north coast of New South Wales, complete with an emergency stop off in a small town to buy clothes and essentials to get us through.

Spending two weeks exploring new and familiar places with a complete sense of relaxation made me truly appreciate the country I was born in for the first time. We spent New Years Eve on a beach in Coffs Harbour, sitting on the sand with a pizza box nestled between us and a bottle of Champagne half dug into the sand. Emily recently found a video of how we saw in the New Year, sitting on our hotel balcony, a pack of cards on the table, laughing hysterically at something that neither of us can quite remember. This night perfectly sums up the entire trip. Easy laughter, no baggage, general contentment.

In December of last year, we returned to Sydney yet again. This time, a lot had changed in our lives. Last year, Emily gave birth to our son, Aubrey, and at almost a year old he’d still only met a small portion of my side of the family. I’d also made the rather large decision to quit my job, realising that working 60 hour weeks to climb a career ladder wasn’t on my list of priorities anymore. While I still maintained that it was essential that I love the work I do, I was now going to work to live, and not the other way around.

We packed our suitcases, boarded a plane as a family and set off for six weeks surrounded by family. What I wasn’t expecting was to fall in love with Sydney. I have already written about this fact earlier in the year,³ but looking through photographs I get snapshots of a few months ago. The fake Facebook affirmations scripted and orchestrated across a friend’s balcony at one in the morning, unbeknownst to the owner of the phone. The intense political debate across a picnic blanket between university friends while my son tries to consume his weight in grass. The childlike excitement I feel as I spot the ice-cream boat coming towards the secluded Sydney harbour beach we’ve just kayaked into. Small moments of joy that culminated into a deep appreciation of my home town that I’ve never felt before.

I look at these photographs and miss Sydney, which is something that I never thought I’d do.