Berry dips in and out of personal recollection and historical detail gracefully; I am tempted to say she makes the city her own, but her writing isn’t so entitled. Unlike many alternative accounts of space, particularly punk spaces, Berry seeks neither to historicise or reify the city she records.

She lays no claim to any iteration of the space she describes, except that it is a space that she relates to, and in turn, she sees parts of it have adapted to her; the expanding suburbs, the record stores, the 90s Police Citizens Youth Club that doubled as a

punk venue.

“See the Hard-Ons by night, learn badminton by day”— Mirror Sydney, page 27.

_{Vanessa Berry c.1997, taken from the author's Instagram.}

In Mirror Sydney, the city not simply sketches towards an urban space or a home. Berry examines Sydney to the hilt, through a series of paratactic living histories, mediated through the body. Her writing finds its home—and [it does feel like a home]— somewhere between celebration and mourning.