Like most people, I have my own part of the city, a relatively confined space with which I am intimately familiar. Over the years the location of that patch has changed, but for the past decade and a bit it has been the area that extends from the University of Sydney west to Marrickville and the Cooks River, along with Alexandria and Erskineville. This region is only one part of the larger expanse of the inner west, but for me at least, its very particular mix of old industrial space, jumbled rows of terrace houses, semis and detached houses from the first few decades of the 20th century seems to capture something essential about the character of this part of Sydney.
The arrival of summer in such densely developed space often seems to have as much to do with a shift in the rhythms of urban life as it does with a change in the weather. Along King Street and Enmore Road, the pubs and bars and restaurants begin to spill out on to the streets, and in the narrow streets behind them, music and laughter drifts through the air as people gather in the houses to drink and talk and dance or wander in the warm possibility of the night.
For me, though, the beginning of summer in the inner west is usually marked by the first cries of the cicadas. As the weather warms throughout October and November, the days begin to be punctuated by the metallic shrill of greengrocers, black princes and silver princesses. And as it grows hotter, their sound seems to somehow become of a piece with the heat, filling the air with a synaesthetic sheen.
The emergence of the cicadas from their subterranean slumber heralds a larger change. As November gives way to December and the days grow longer, the vegetation in the streets and parks of the inner west seems to grow lusher and heavier. More so than in any other part of Sydney, the waves of development and gentrification are visible in the fabric of the inner west. In Marrickville, Tempe and Sydenham old factories and warehouses testify to the area’s industrial past, while the gardens and orchards planted by Greek and Italian families in the 1960s and 1970s speak to the patterns of immigration that continue to shape the area. And beneath it all, the system of canals and drains that bear rainwater westwards to the Cooks River testify to a time before European invasion when much of this area was part of a wetland known as Gumbramorra swamp, one of a much larger system of interconnected creeks and wetlands that followed the river to Botany Bay and was Gadigal Country.
In the summer these various histories form a palimpsest, overlaying one another. Over my back fence, years of loving labour by my elderly Greek neighbour and her late husband have transformed the rocky hillside into an orchard, in which stand lemon, orange, peach and fig trees. When we moved here nearly 10 years ago, soft white mesh still shrouded the figs and stone fruits every summer to protect the fruit from bats and birds. For the past few summers the trees have been left unprotected, and you can hear the bats that stream outwards from the colony in the Wolli Creek reserve in Turrella shrieking as they gorge themselves in the night.
Nor are the bats the only reminder of a time before this place was cleared and divided up into streets and houses. On hot nights the plonk of banjo frogs can be heard, as well as the songs of crickets. The clamour of the birds grows more intense in the mornings and afternoons of early summer, as the cries of koels and channel-billed cuckoos mingle with the chattering of lorikeets and the honking of the ibises that roost in the palm trees along Carrington Road and elsewhere.
Once Christmas has passed and the heat of January and February descends, this explosion of life grows slower and more somnolent. This shift in tempo is a reminder that the idea of summer is a notion imported from European agricultural traditions, a coloniser’s lens that obscures as much as it reveals.The Dharawal people, whose country stretches through the south of what is now Sydney to the Shoalhaven, have six seasons, arising out of the land itself. For them the months of November and December are the time of parra’dowee, when the eel spirit calls his children to him, while the hot days and nights of January and February are the time of burran, when the weetjellan, or hickory wattle, is heavy with pale yellow blooms and the eating of meat is forbidden.
In the inner west, these months can be oppressive – over the years I have become familiar with the experience of getting into my car or on to a train in the city or the east, only to discover it is 5C hotter when I step out in the inner west. But they are also magical, a space of warm nights in which time stretches outwards and the city hums with the presence of the natural world.
• James Bradley is a novelist and critic. His work includes Ghost Species, Wrack and the Resurrectionist
