Don Bank Writer in Residence for 2025/26
Since last August, I’ve had a space dedicated to my writing through to next February, thanks to the Writer in Residence program run by North Sydney Council. Even including my years in Tokyo, I had never had a work studio; I always worked at home, or when I needed a change of scenery, moved from one coffee shop to another. Having my own room for six months in a tranquil old house with a beautiful garden feels like too much luxury to me.
The space is located inside Don Bank, the oldest timber cottage in North Sydney. Once owned by the White family, Irish saddlers who ran a business near the Pacific Highway, the cottage now sits in the heart of North Sydney, surrounded by skyscrapers.
Its dark, quaint rooms feel as though they belong to another world. I never imagined such a place existed, tucked away behind the busy Pacific Highway. This historic gem seems to stimulate the curiosity of local residents and office workers; as I sit on the front terrace, passersby often stop, eager to learn more about the place.
Once inside, the thick air, scented with antiquity, wraps around the senses. After struggling with the key and closing the heavy door behind, the present slips away, and you are drawn back into the nineteenth century, when the cottage’s original inhabitants lived here.
At first, despite usually being alone in the house, I felt self-conscious, a misfit in this European settler’s abode with antiquities and ornament. I sensed the house’s spirit sizing me up: Who the hell is this Asian woman?
I studied the former owners, a couple in a hand-coloured photograph hanging beside the studio door, and said, “Ojyamashimasu,” like a boarder entering a room for the first time. James and Johana remained still, their emotions hidden beneath Victorian attire.
Later, in the garden, I discovered the trace of a slit trench dug during the war by the White family after the Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour in 1942. This suggested that my sense of not being entirely welcome was not paranoia.
The quaint atmosphere of Don Bank, along with the sense of antagonism I imagined from its original owners, felt like an ideal setting in which to work on a project I had long carried in my mind. Since returning to Sydney in 2016 after twenty-five years away, I had been scribbling notes about my childhood spent moving between Sydney and Tokyo, hoping to shape them into a collection of short stories. My memories of Sydney were partly shadowed by wartime histories that lingered long after the war itself, and this room seemed an ideal place to write about recollections suspended between times, places and inherited unease.
As I write this, a set of photographs from the time my family lived in Sydney sits on my desk. The photos show me and my sister in our Japanese school uniforms, standing in front of the house we once called home. I discovered them at my parents’ apartment during my last visit to Japan and brought them along as a talisman for the project. Now placed by the window, the photographs align with the view outside, so past and present seem to converse, layered together in a single glance.
Now, with a room of my own and a deadline (residency that ends in February), I feel ready to bring these stories to life.
