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Writing the City, or, The Story of a Sydney Walk

To have lived in a place, left it, and returned as a visitor. What is this position, this “place”, this state of being no longer at home. Not a resident, with all the easy everyday intimacy and banality of that, nor yet a tourist, adrift in glittering strangeness. This semi-estrangement, this state of being a semi-stranger, is one thing I will explore in this paper. Another thing is walking. I will attempt to evoke and unwind the experience of walking, across the course of a whole day, in Sydney. In this I will reflect upon and extend an earlier body of research work that attempted to write urban space and experience in Stockholm, through the story of a long walk undertaken on a winter's day. The intent there was to explore the deliberately constructed subjectivity of feminist place-writing and where it intersects with that thread of critical tourism studies that focuses on embodiment, sensuality, and phenomenology. Framed as an explicit homage to Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinen's essay “The Body in Tourism”, using both the form and content of that essay as a point of departure, the essay employed experimental writing practices to attempt a new mode of representing and narrativizing urban experience. Through the manipulation of writerly form, it attempted to render the scholarly text opaque and explicitly constructed, attempted to write both theory and practice into place and time, to incorporate the experiential and observational into scholarly work.