Excerpts from "Four Years on the Southside."

"I'll never forget it, but I sometimes wish I could. That house. That horrible house where three of the people I've loved lived at one time or another. The sad one. The disappointing one. The one across the hallway.

After that it was a series of different houses within a short distance of the first one. One to pass the time. One to start over. One to recover from the first two. 

...

The Southside had its appeal. It was on the other side of the river. It was wide and open and had fewer trees and more trucks, which I liked because it spoke to my sensibilities as a reluctant and abashed member of the upper middle class. I thought looking at trucks instead of poincianas as I walked to work was giving me valuable life experience. Sometimes I would walk from Greenslopes to Buranda station trying not to let the construction workers see me crying, but I didn't think about what kind of life experience that might be giving me. 

I see now that it was probably more poignant, in this respect, than trucks."