My Hometown

Three weeks ago I moved from Sydney back to my hometown of Brisbane. Fortune seemed set against my departure: the rental car I picked up the morning I had to be out of the house had a fault and needed to be exchanged, then I realised I’d underestimated the amount of boot space needed, my delayed start meant I caught the Friday afternoon traffic and didn’t get out of greater Sydney until early evening, and the heavens opened up with buckets of rain for a good chuck of the trip. A couple of hours after midnight with several bottles of energy drink in me I realised my mind wasn’t following the road very well; I had a system of concentrating on the taillights of a truck ahead of me, but when there was no truck the darkness seemed eager to swallow me up. Heeding the pleas from friends and family I stopped and caught a couple hours of sleep, which I think prevented me from becoming flaming wreckage.

No one asks you why you move from Brisbane to Sydney, but people have been asking me why I moved back, and I doubt my responses are very convincing. Leaving Sydney I left not just a warm metropolitan beating heart but some of the most incredible people I’ve known. Even though I know I’ll see these friends again, plenty of my nights have since been filled with a pretty consuming sense of loss. The thing is that despite these relationships, while I was in Sydney I was living a pretty empty life, on a trajectory towards a permanent fade out. It really came down to either Disappear Here or sacrifice it all and bet everything on the creative road. Just something that had to be done.

“For art, once again…”

Today on my way to a class “Doing Things with French Theory” (how about that title?) I received a call from QPIX, Queensland’s entry-level film funding body, to inform me that a short film script I submitted Clara has been selected for development in their Raw Nerve programme, their highest-level funding programme. Of course this is not a concrete funding offer as only three scripts are finally selected for production, but suddenly there is the bright shining projector light at the end of the tunnel.

So. Now not only do I have that child-like imperative to make something that needs making but I have a group of people to whom I owe it all. Thank you Daniel, Anita, Maurice, Josh, Meredith, Darryn, Laura, Steven, Thomas, Anna, Dahvid, and Alex. I’ll be thinking of you all in coming months.