Australian Nostalgia

• Alvin Chung, Grade 12, Killara High School
• Short Story
• 2016

Excellence Award in the 'Word Zone 2016' competition

Darkness drops again after the manifold upsurges of light and the pale pink dawn and the affluent shimmer and the afterglow of a crimson dusk. My sky is a perpetual metamorphosis; the scent of distant melting timbers slowly expands: it is the burning of private nightmares and of an eternity of dreamlessness.

I am not born in Sydney, but in Hong Kong - a vitalizing metropolis - a city charged with impetus every moment which never rests. I lived there for fourteen years. It was in 2013 that I first set foot onto Australia when everything in the universe slowed down like falling into water and sinking into an unknown depth. That depth, dear reader, is my future. I saw Australia from the eyes of an outsider: It was not wild nor quiet nor slow nor fast.

In the three years I spent in Sydney, I may well had been inhaled into the fabric of Australian history; the role is small, no doubt, but history is composed of small individuals and the little things. Little things such as silent contemplations of the crimson sky at sundown; I remember how I was first seized by the red heavens above and how its brief outbursts of beauty overwhelmed me like a wave of apocalyptic flood. I have learnt about beauty, nature and time, here in Sydney. Time is a mysterious thing and the act of brooding over it can plunge one into a cosmic black hole. To me, Australia is the constant present, the place for the here and now. Here, nostalgia is the longing for the present, and longing is the nostalgia for the future. Of course, when the night arrives and the dark curtain is drawn along the sky, the past sometimes haunts us like specters. The involuntary adumbrations for the future may also enter our consciousness. But the clean air of Sydney suburbs always brings us back to the present by the lure of purity and beauty.

I once took a walk along the Pacific Highway at dawn, the suburbs were then tinted with earth colors - bronze and brown. Vehicles drowned the Highway and the people were going home perhaps after a day of work. Life, throughout the plethora of generations from the provenance of humankind, has always been an infinite series of strivings - we desire one thing after another. I saw that in the faint glimmer of sadness in the smoke emitted from the cars’ engines. But the unnamed, indescribable and inscrutable spirits of Australia’s past dwelling in the simple houses and in the simple trees and the simple sky, would come to soothe and heal the suffering humanity.

Australia, as a place, may not be with its habitats forever, but it will last forever in my mind even if someday I would leave this place and never to return. Australia is my youth, it is my sky, it blazes as bonfire like the fire of my life. The Australian land is as eternal as the present moment.