Charlotte Ave, Marrickville on Friday, 4 December 2020

This street forms a corner with Myrtle Street where I went many months ago. The picture-perfect house which I found so hyperreal seems to be empty. It sits here glowing yellow in the sunshine with shuttered windows as it looked before. In Charlotte Avenue is a second similar building belonging to the same property, its driveway guarded by cypress trees.

Across the street is an abandoned construction project for a new residential home. The hessian cloth on the tumbled fence is torn and sagging. Tagging covers the unfinished brick walls. At the top, it says: ‘It’s going to be okay’. The building or our lives, I wonder? At this end, you look towards a railway track, half hidden behind bushes. A freight train passes and continues over the bridge crossing Victoria Street. At the other end the street curves at an old sandstone wall. Steps go up to where the suburb continues on a higher level.