In his amusing essay, ‘The More Things Change’, John Birmingham writes:

Sydney will always confound, infuriate, engage and seduce. It is a provider/destroyer, madonna/whore and prophet of the main chance. It is hated, feted, loved and envied. It cares not. Self-obsessed and cosmopolitan, tacky, shallow and deeply serious, it knows its own worth and vainly overstates it at every turn – as when one speaker at the last (sic) Premier’s litfest dinner favourably compared the old tart with the Florence of Michelangelo. The gasps at the dinner tables were probably in surprise that anyone could think to bracket Sydney with such a provincial backwater.

While, I hope, ironic, this observation could be said to be indicative of the attitude behind many of the individual chapters in this anthology.