I'm really supposed to be writing my novel, but instead I decided to write a passage capturing the Australian essence:

Taking the escalator down to the concourse, I follow the monorail's ghost toward Circular Quay until I pass out of Barangaroo. And here, on the baking road, are the Australians: sun-ruined, freckled, leathery, zinc-streaked, grinning, gap-toothed, tattooed, thonged, luminous in activewear; the Australians, with their melanomas and meat pies, their ute loans and unit trusts, their foreign wars fought for somebody else's empire, their pokies grief, smashed avo discourse, colossal mortgages on fibro boxes, their slab-a-week loyalty, their barbecue diplomacy, their ill-fitting khaki and enormous utes, their mateship invoked at funerals and abandoned at Centrelink, their flinty pragmatism and seeping cruelty, their narrow electorates and broad beaches, their drunken Anzac Days, drunken Melbourne Cups, drunken Christmas lunches, drunken custody arrangements, their poets nobody reads, their saints nobody canonised, their one-way tickets to London at twenty-three, their building-site coastline, their burning hinterland, their lamingtons, long blacks, Berocca, their southern-cross tattoos, their overpriced shiraz and middling Thai, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their paved-over history, their salted country and their inveterate talent for looking the other way. Every face is a compendium of weathers, unmediated by the poreless finish of the Eastern Suburbs; to walk among them is to be plunged into a current of invention, a human ballad so defiant it seems on the point of singing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the glass towers of Martin Place can offer to compare…then I remember that this was always the arrangement, that the storyless, faceless towers of finance underwrite all this humanity and are the actuaries who price the fabric of the day.