August in Edinburgh. After ten months here I begin the Festival holed up in a youth hostel-run university residence after a housing mishap involving a dog, a loch full of swans and a bullish Canadian DIY homewrecker, paying £17.50 a night for the novelty of my own room. Out of habit and work until the start of the International on the 11th, I begin trawling the Royal Mile in search of signs that it has all begun. Amid the fresh crowds (in miniature) and concrete maypoles, I am rewarded early by a free ticket to see Sharon Neil, a blind Irish clairvoyant in previews at the Pod, a white marquee erected in the usually vacant square between the Filmhouse and the Lyceum-Traverse-Garage theatre triangle. My friend Jean (not her real name)and I beat most of the queue forming out onto Lothian Road, a mixed but mostly female collection of families and young people, and arranged ourselves on benches near the back so Jean could beat any wayward spirit activity to the door.

Sharon, a petite woman in white is led to the middle of the tent, and

On this humid night in northern midsummer, Regent Road curves up beside the Old Town, past white cranes at the site of the new Parliament, beneath the crags and green of Arthur’s Seat. The evening light glitters on parked cars and tilted windows, as a yellow train winds amid the ancient rooftops, spearmint domes, spires, the distant, dusky bulk of the Castle. No sound but the gulls, drifting back to neighbouring Leith, random traffic, the purple heather waving against the fence.

This is Edinburgh, on the edge of August, before the world arrives. I arrived here last November to find a film set: soft rain falling through mist, gleaming off wet cobblestones, the facades of the Old Town coming home to gothic, hulking under amber streetlights in the darkness of the early afternoon. The misery of lost light can’t stop and probably causes the hoards of drunken Scots spilling up the Cowgate and into the Grassmarket, modern spirits in the old execution ground. Beguiled by a few days of sun a month ago and the ever-deepening light of the evenings I had forgotten the long winter, like the loneliness of every first night in a new city, until a sudden recent downpour brought darkness and silence, few out of doors, the wet swish or lone cars and only two of the Cowgate lads under my windows. I come to a city to see the way it changes and the way I change for being in its presence and if I can record this then I can say I lived here, rather than simply passed through. This is what I have come to think of as the witness position: watching and learning from a position of immersion, within each new country I inhabit.

It’s now almost two years since I left the Towers burning in Pitt Street and flew, clutching the seat, to Canada: a small rowboat on choppy seas, a fist raised at the departing cliffs, a voice crying: ‘That’s one more gone, now you can take the Tampa!’I was a dissatisfied Australian, sitting uncomfortably between intellectual and popular and all two aware of the culture that enforces this division. Betrayal, frustration, the corruption of my industry - the sour memories have faded somewhat, but I have no desire to return. I know that my ‘home’ is elsewhere, may be, in fact, in the fixed identity of the wanderer. For every sense of anxiety or instability there is a corresponding enrichment, like the curious fondness I feel for the maple leaf flag. Like the shaman’s concept of the ‘hollow reed’ or bone, what was Australian within me has been pushed out to enable something of the real Canada, the real Scotland, to come in. Surrounded last year by Canadian culture, a different world, I was spared the old familiar accent and adapted my own to suit the occasional demands of the courtroom.

Confronted with the odd traveller and swathes of them in Britain’s enormous, noisy antipodean community I become aware of my own oddness; my natural spontaneity and congeniality are instantly curbed. I can struggle to find common ground. Sensitive to sound, I can literally feel the vibrations drop when an Australian speaks, and it leaves me confused and floundering. The one exception is my current boss, a light-voiced long-term expatriate who is probably also a wanderer but has settled here. I look to her in amazement at having made the transition, in defiance of the ‘lucky country’. The Scots have a quaint expression: your address is not where you live but where you ‘stay’, a term that is appropriate also for a new generation of world citizens, moving through increasingly invisible borders. The witness position is how I make my living, but also what is happening to me. I am watching myself change, outside and in.