Martin Edmonds

In this collection of prose pieces, memory and daydreaming are powerful forces, determinants rather than second-order effects. Its theme I take to be the transactions of past and present as they are occasioned by the spaces of a city (in this case, Sydney) or, to use another approach, Sydney’s ghosts. The title of almost every piece is or was an actual place in Sydney. The sites Edmond’s imagination gravitates towards might be seen as typical: the legendary once-sharehouse (‘The Caledonian’), soggy-carpeted nightclub (‘The Manzil Room’), harbour’s edge (‘Blackwattle Bay’). While the pieces mostly derive from Edmond’s personal experiences of the city, some are effected by the work of archival research, amplifying the double vision of the past being tangible in the present.