By David Uptin
I’ve never known who to support in the State of Origin. This began in my pre-teens, when I professed a proudly contrarian disinterest in all sport (famously proclaiming I supported Victoria), and has continued into my adulthood even as I’ve matured past such facetiousness. I was born and raised in Queensland, but both my parents are from coastal towns in New South Wales and have been proud Blues supporters for as long as I can remember. There’s something I find compelling about Blues supporters in Queensland, an acknowledgement of the pull history can have on a person, hometown forever in the back of your mind like a first love.
It’s bizarre to feel such a way about a place you’ve never lived.
For my entire life, visits to the state of New South Wales have held a cherished freedom and violent nostalgia. We’d go on road trips to visit grandparents, driving the Pacific and Princes Highways, crystal ocean at the edge of our vision, immersing ourselves in said grandparents’ simple retirement lifestyles, far from any of the cares that plagued us. The crisp coastal winds and perfectly blue water absorbed all that identified our true lives until we felt united with silent, wild nature. We hardly visited that sprawling, beating city at the heart of the state, but we would skirt its periphery, note its presence.
As I moved to Brisbane and grew into adulthood, life’s stressors multiplied. I of course nourished and treasured my independence, but I do wonder if we all need a fantasy, a place to flee in our minds when reality overpowers.
For me, that place became childhood road trips along the New South Welsh coast.
I convinced my friends to accompany me on a few similar road trips during my university years. This time, however, we also visited Sydney, exploring its centre, the glistening harbour and beaches. Whenever I ponder the source of my current financial woes, I remind myself I’ve made nine separate trips to Sydney in the last three years. Like so many of my Brisbane arts student comrades, I fell hard for our nation’s older, larger, more aesthetically sophisticated cities. I dreamt of escaping the brown snake, trading hot summers for crisp, brown autumns, and sinking into that glistening harbour where no one knew me, where I could become nothing but an observer, appreciator.
When I received advice about getting involved in interstate writers’ festivals (including Sydney’s), to show on your resume that you’re willing to travel for bookish work, you didn’t have to ask me twice.
I’ve volunteered at the Sydney Writers’ Festival two years in a row now. 2025, as I’ve written about for Glass previously, was a numb and liminal year of my life; ergo, I decided a trip to my favourite city for bookish events was just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I got two trips out of the festival: once for orientation, flying down and back within the day, and once for the festival itself.
The fleeting nature of my initial trip for orientation made it glow even brighter in my memory. We remember where we didn’t get enough time, never where we spent too much. I wandered round Sydney’s inner suburbs before and after my orientation, headphones in as I listened for the first time to what would become my most played album of 2025, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. This music I’d never encountered became inextricably tied to the place I heard it in; punching, futuristic synths ringing from the city’s skyscrapers. Janet sang in my ears about going on an escapade right as I strolled round Circular Quay, and I decided that was exactly what was happening: the ultimate, euphoric escape, a beholding of a beauty and transcendence impossible to achieve back in the city everyone calls boring.
Now, I’ve just returned from the 2026 Sydney Writers’ Festival. I’ve heard so many seminars from inspirational writers, met plenty of beautiful souls I’d have never encountered otherwise.
And I’ve never been more grateful for home.
Writers’ festivals are fantastic, transcendent experiences that I cannot recommend enough, but sitting melancholic on a rattling train for an hour every day to attend them is not. I longed for my own space, my own bed, the friends I’d left, the Queensland sun on my skin. No more standing squished against a train door from the volume of people for some reason out and about at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and having to be there again the next morning. The shockingly endless swarms of old brick walk-ups and terrace houses did not appeal to me as it had in the past. Every previous visit has felt a fantasy, a dream, but for whatever reason reality has at last set in.
One of the most consistently expensive cities in the world is never going to be an easy place to live, as corroborated by everyone I’ve seen from there who’s not rich and/or an influencer. The autumn air of the City and Inner West, which I’d once romanticised, tasted artificial on my tongue this time around. I think of Circular Quay and remember every time I’ve been there entranced, yet now also a mere two days ago, when I frantically ran for the train, rain-soaked, the historic Rocks buildings that once hypnotised me now inexplicably triggering a headache instead.
People call Brisbane unsophisticated, disorganised, dirty, lacking in culture and art. Those are all partially true (except the last), but I can’t help but wonder if we as a city need to undergo exercises in gratitude.
I visit our parks, relish space that’s mine alone, feel sun on my skin, watch refreshing rain that’s over in a few hours, stare at our mountains encircling us all like protectors.
That elusive contentment I’ve chased my whole life is within reach.
