AFTER MANY YEARS, I am, again, home. I am weary from the long flight but enlivened now, standing outside in the blinding sunshine that I have always taken for granted. A cliché, but a welcome one – Queensland, the Sunshine State. I am comforted by a familiar warmth and a weight in the air that I’ve not felt in ages. 

I am waiting to cross the street at the corner of Ann and Roma outside my hotel. I can see the Methodist church, City Hall and the on-­ramp to the elevated Riverside Expressway, which obstructs my view of the river itself. A sporty, bright-green ute speeds past me down Ann Street, its neon chassis flashing precariously close as I stand on the pavement, still in a half ­daze, sleep deprived and over-­caffeinated. The moment just about passes me by before I can comprehend it: the grotesque face jutting from the driver’s window, its mouth a gaping pit from which a string of words is loudly and intently aimed in my direction but which I only receive as indecipherable, garbled nonsense, the meaning lost to the velocity and drag of the vehicle. I turn my head dumbly, following the trailing voice that seems to hang suspended in the slipstream of the ute as it charges away, horn honking aggressively, before swerving sharply onto the on-­ramp at the intersection with George.