Would I like to write about my favourite place?

The invitation inspired me to recall so many magical places – from north-east Arnhem Land to Mediterranean island hamlets with idyllic quayside tavernas, from the Melbourne Cricket Ground on grand final day to Dickensian London pubs, from picture postcard villages beneath snow-capped alpine peaks to the haunts of my literary giants and on to Joshua Tree and Hagia Sofia.

Ultimately, though, I returned to an Australian place I’ve probably wandered through more than any other. I no longer go there regularly. I don’t even live in the same city. Yet it’s to the heights of Canberra’s Red Hill, with its walking tracks, scar trees and ochre earth underfoot, that my memory keeps transporting me. The place remains as vivid in my recollections as if I still visited daily.

As someone who became a parent at a relatively young age and having walked through so much of life with dogs at my heels, perhaps it’s not unusual that my connections to different places feel strongest where my memories of them are seeded with kids and canine family.

And that brings me inexorably back to Red Hill from whose pinnacle can be viewed the ghostly visage of the Griffins’ geometrically designed (but never realised) city on the........

© The Guardian