Prelapsarian Sydney

Among the most pleasing aspects of Australian cities is the way the natural world survives in them; the sense that an urban overlay is only recent and a couple of layers of bitumen thin. Of course I love this. I get nostalgic about the 1980s, when you could stand looking out from Mueller Street or Bradshaw Drive in Alice Springs and the desert started from there. Or, as you walked out of Tennant Creek on a moonless night there was a point where the street lights stopped and the dark hood of the desert night fell; where the only way you could tell where you were was from the texture underfoot - bitumen, bitumen, gravel, gravel, whoops ouch spinifex, gravel, gravel...But even in our biggest cities, you can experience the pinprick of nature. Cross the Yarra at East Richmond (in Melbourne), right near the Skipping Girl Vinegar sign, and you're walking through vineyards and remnant bush where signs by the walking paths warn you to watch out for snakes. Sydney has even more impressive fingers of bush reaching deep into the city and its suburbs.

Squat brown blocks of Commission flats have been demolished recently in Glebe and there, revealed for the first time in however many years, are the sandstone terraces that once stood at the head of Blackwattle Bay when the harbour at this point reached up beyond what is now Wentworth Park Greyhound Track.

Once upon a time there may have been aboriginal engravings here. Flat sandstone terraces often served the Cadigal people as galleries. And there are engravings in similar places around Sydney - huge figures of whales at Berry Island Reserve or by the walking track between Bondi and Tamarama. The one overlooking the sea near Tamarama depicts a man inside the whale. What tragic pre-European event does that record?

But this continuing presence of the natural world; the way the natural networks still connect may explain why the place I loved most in New York was that little pocket in the northwest, Inwood Hill Park, which still looks much the same as when Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island off the Wiechquasgeck Indians.