I lived on 1/25 Ray Road, at Emmaus Bible College where my dad was a student - there was a little playground that all the units faced onto.
After school, I'd leave my uniform in a puddle on the floor, change into whatever was at hand and run out - spilling into the playground with all the other children there - other Korean kids, some Aussies, Armenians...
The sandbox was fun, but the creek was where I found the tadpoles and the frogs - trapped them in a jar, to watch them grow legs and sing.
They never did.
Fast-forward 10 years, the place has been razed, the creek's now a trickle, the frogs warble no more.
There's an apartment complex, smack bang over where we used to live.
5 stories high and sleek-shiny-new - not a small brick affair.
- But the office-house was deemed historical, and left in peace.
There are dozens of shops now, another shopping-residential complex over what used to be an empty lot, the supermarket's expanded, the station upgraded - it's now a major(-ish) connection to the city.
Walk the streets, see the signage - the people, the people, the people.
Australia is growing, and so are its buildings - sometimes too fast (the Stepford-esque neighbourhoods, eerily quiet), often too slow - rent and congestion soar. It's these everyday problems I hear on the news, the constructions signs that mushroom on the streets that signal that the slow-moving haze I remember has gone. The sleek buildings keep rising, rising, rising.
And so the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge have competition, now - Sydney Harbour's first high rise building will join their ranks as an "iconic building" come 2014:
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/lend-lease-given-approval-to-build-highrise-over-water-20101216-18zqm.html?from=smh_sb
Sydney's busy, keeping up with "New York, Singapore and London."
http://www.businessreviewaustralia.com/tags/sydney-harbour/lend-lease-build-first-high-rise-sydney-harbour-area
Frogs find new ponds, and a city is more than just people, just place -
memory animates, connects.
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