My mother calls her arrival in Australia ‘the years of hell’. In one story, she worked at the dry cleaners for a thousand unbroken days. By happy accident, she never left. Thanks to Bob Hawke’s tearful tribute, she stumbled into citizenship after 1989, the winner of a grisly scratchcard along with some forty thousand other Chinese. To this day, she votes Labor.

The war between the gods of the city ended on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, when Duke Denver impaled the old patriarch Black Fern with a sharpened lamppost in the middle of a busy intersection. The traffic backed up for twenty-two kilometres, and in the following hours, dozens of drivers and passengers were hospitalised for heatstroke. Hundreds of bats fell out of the trees, their small bodies littering the pavements. Half the city succumbed to the blackout.