I've been running a bit of an informal poll around people I know, trying to find out if they've ever read a book, seen a film, passed a poem, come into contact with anything that captures the 'spirit' of Sydney to them. I don't mean something that is about Sydney, but something that actually sums up or comes close to how you view the city, a text that you could say to someone, "This is a Sydney book." Most people look sheepish and shrug and say, "No, I don't have one," which is fine, because neither do I. But lately I've been expanding it into texts that capture what Australia is about, if you can, I guess, since it's a rather difficult task to capture a nation's psyche and cultural time in any kind of way...