Apocalyptic skies, a homecoming like no other

I have to dig a bit to figure out when this summer was, as I don’t have photos to prompt my memory. But I do have dates to help. I know it isn’t my first one back in Sydney after living in Hong Kong for the previous six years. That was 2011, and I spent that summer trying to get my career back on track – taking any shift, any day, any time.

So the summer that sticks with me is a year after that, the summer of 2012. I know that, too, because I am obsessively listening to the Presets – specifically Promises and Fall. A quick Google tells me they are both from that year, so my dates are holding up. I have a habit of listening to one or two songs over and over, sometimes dozens of times a day, unpacking every element. These two are on high rotation, and mirror an optimism I feel after a long year of re-establishing my life in a city I used to know – but one that changed as much as I had, in the time I lived away.

The ocean has always been a tonic for Kumi Taguchi.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

I have an apartment now, a rental with old cabinetry in the kitchen and scratched skirting boards, but it is mine. I got the lease when I finally landed a permanent job. No more hustling for shifts, no more worrying about how much money will be in my next pay cheque. I feel free to enjoy life, for the first time in a long time.

And I have made new friends. One is from work, and we bond over photography, travel and music and watching Mad Men. We talk about Sydney and the blue skies and the beaches and white sand. We’ve both lived overseas and know what it feels like to be a stranger at home.

Insight host Kumi Taguchi.Credit: SBS

One day, he asks me if I am keen to head up to a beach north of the city. I have no plans, the summer days feel long and full of possibility. Of course I say yes. He picks me up and we play music as we drive, windows down. It feels like I have rewound to days many years before, when life was all ahead of me.

The streets are crammed with cars, angling for parking. It’s been hotter than normal and there have been fires about. Most of the country is in the midst of a heatwave. As a result, there is a magnetic draw among so many to be near water – an in-built biological radar towards safety.

We find a spot on the hot sand and lay down our towels and simply exist. It is calm and perfect. And then, perhaps because of a wind change, the mood shifts. I can still see the image now: the sky glowing a strange orange, illuminated by the fires burning further south.

The water, cool and blue, eerily contrasting with the colours above. It feels wrong, somehow. Apocalyptic. Even the sounds around me are muffled and uncertain. It is as if there is a collective silent gasp of – what? Solidarity? Fear?

Faces looking up, in unison. Children tapping the arms of their parents and looking to the sky. Kids on their surfboards scanning upwards, instead of scanning for waves. I remember commenting on the eeriness and uncomfortable beauty of it all.

And then, as quickly as it came, it is over. Five minutes, perhaps? The wind changes again and the skies turn back from black to blue, and the strangeness ends. But now, there is a time before that strange sky, and a time after. And a sense that, in an instant, fortunes can change.

I race down to the water and jump in, leaping in the waves and ducking underneath their crispness. The water has always felt free to me, but this freedom feels particularly vibrant. And life, somehow more precious. And a feeling that I am, finally, home.

Kumi Taguchi is a journalist, broadcaster and the host of Insight on SBS. Insight returns to SBS and SBS on Demand on March 4 at 8:30pm and Kumi Taguchi’s memoir ‘The Good Daughter’ will be released by Simon & Schuster on April 30.

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