I recently learned (was it from Martin Amis?) that ‘pulchritude’ is a synonym for ‘beauty’. How can such an ugly word be associated with beauty? I feel the same way about ‘Sydney’, named by Governor Phillip for the British Secretary of State who had suggested an Australian colony. An ugly word that is the name of a beautiful topography, a geologically complex and weathered arrangement of water and land, and more water and land, and a spread of fragmented populations that are in many cases discrete, so discrete that where a person lives and works in this city, defines and confines them. Infrastructure and transport must cope as best they can, and with as much money as government can muster.

Louis Nowra’s Sydney, he admits, is ‘bounded by Chippendale, Redfern, Ultimo, Walsh Bay, the harbour, Surry Hills, Woolloomooloo and, of course, the Rocks’. In 2013, he published Kings Cross: A biography, and in 2017, Woolloomooloo: A biography (now there’s a name!). Biography? The term has become de rigueur in recent decades (with biographies of salt and cod and the vagina), but Nowra, I reckon, has got it right, not only because cities have a pulse, but because he tells us more about people, and sometimes his own relationship to them, than a straightforward history or overview of a place would include. Do people make a city or does the city shape the people? I reread Ruth Park while reading Sydney.

In Woolloomooloo, ‘Woolley’ is his Virgil, a nice conceit. Woolley has empathy for ‘the hurt, lonely, obstreperous, intemperate, delusional and shambolic locals’. Towards the end of the book, Nowra walks with his partner along Darlinghurst streets and becomes Virgil for you and me. He is compassionate, even celebratory, towards the people he describes: the ice-addict who is given food by the waiter at Una’s on Victoria Street but who rarely eats it; the destitute; the woman who helps at the community centre. This is Nowra’s stomping ground: he is gregariously and openly seduced by it.

Nowra grew up on a housing commission estate north of Melbourne. His father drove him to Sydney when he was nine, and some twenty years later he was living in Chippendale, walking the streets as an antipodean flâneur: ‘I fell in love with [Sydney] as only someone who wasn’t born there could.’