2025-07-16

Last week I travelled to Sydney for a work party. It was fun! My accomodation was just around the corner from our first apartment in Surry Hills, which we moved into in early 2005, soon after getting married. The neighbourhood has hardly changed at all. The apartment was tiny, but we loved it.

It was twenty years ago, but it seems like only yesterday. We had a flat-screen HD television, with a Topfield PVR for time shifting (so we could pause and record live TV). I remember I recorded the music video for Augie March’s “One Crowded Hour” and watched it over and over.

I had a GameCube and a Playstation2. I fondly remember being by myself one public holiday and buying Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube in the morning, along with a six pack and a few bags of chips, and playing the game for eight hours straight. The last time in my life that I’ve done that.

We had a Nintendo DS each and could play Mario Kart in wireless multiplayer. We had 3G flip phones from NEC with a Three subscription and could video call each other. I remember video calling my wife in Perth one evening while I was walking across Pyrmont Bridge in Sydney.

I used to walk to work and would listen to new-fangled podcasts on my iPod Shuffle, which I had to plug into my iMac G4 and sync with iTunes. It all worked great, and was perfectly fine, and I would be happy to do the same today.

We had pretty fast ADSL in our apartment, and at work. We started using this thing called YouTube. I was also using Flickr, but there wasn’t really much other social media to speak of.

We ate dim sum and pho and Thai (Spice I Am was a favourite) and Korean BBQ often. We hosted dinner parties to play board games, including Carcassonne and Catan. We went out drinking and to parties and to brunch on weekends at Lemon on Crown Street. We slept in late and then rushed to do our shopping at at Paddy’s Market before it closed.

After a year or so we had a baby and moved to Glebe, which was also lovely.

But returning after such a long time made me feel like Lily Allen singing about London. Once the haze of the rose-tinted glasses faded, I realised that inner Sydney can really be rather dirty and depressing at times. I mean, there is literally a layer of black dust on everything, something which you never really notice in Perth. And there are so many people that seem… a bit off-kilter?

I saw a show at the opera house and was surprised to see such a large number of preppy 14yo boys. There’d be a mum and dad, both looking rather intellectual, both in their mid-fifties, and a young boy sat between them in a collared shirt and blazer. I saw dozens of families like this. What’s the deal?

I’m a sucker for nostalgia and enjoyed revisiting the old stomping ground. But it was never about the place. More about the people and the moment. And, I must admit, I do kind-of miss the technology too.