As long as you have a bus ticket, you can go as long as you like wrapped in silence in Sydney. Your muteness sets you outside the bustle, as though your mind is pressed against a two-way mirror. Everything feels grotesquely processed, especially here in the tourist battery cage of Circular Quay. Overpriced chicken burgers swell in greasy light and the new summer’s humidity is so absolute that you chew the air like a cud. On the pier today, the crowd is a mix of old money, young money, travellers, tourists and washed out party-goers all escaping to the green of Watson’s Bay and the Gap. You leave the city behind and forty-five minutes later the ferry vomits you out onto a wooden pier. The mass splits whilst moving. Some go to the opulent sunshine and plush grass of Watson’s Bay - the W.C. Field’s “What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?” playground of the wealthy while others are drawn upwards, out to the views from the cliffs behind Watson’s Bay. Up here is the Gap, a ready alcove in the cliffs of South Heads that flaunts postcard views and a reputation for suicide.

On the left-hand side of the Gap sits Jacob’s ladder, a place named for the rung like lines of jagged rock that mark its face. Today tourists with fluttering smiles snap greedy stills of each other and a young couple touch their sandalled feet with unconscious tenderness beneath the safety fence. It’s so damned nice it hurts. The fence separates the tourist from the edge, but all it would take is a sudden jump, hands picking up a splinter of pine on the way over. The faces of surprised witnesses loosening with your four long strides and then bang, you’re over the edge. Then you’re alone again. The scene is so perfect, so ready; you want someone to jump just to complete the silent picture of this place.

On the south side of the Gap a large boulder sits up high. It’s probably the only place where it’s still possible to clear the fence and cliffs in one go. A young girl is sitting there when I arrive, watching the ocean as though searching for some nostrum. She suits the scene, the stretched out ocean drenched in romantic allusions and empty time. Her neck cranes slightly, her weight shifted forward over crossed legs as she hunches over her notebook. In an approaching dusk she reminds me of the softness of youth and its angst, that unique combination of fragility.

When she leaves I clamber up onto the rock and see the names of those who have died here scratched into the sandstone, along with the length of their lifetimes; Paul Hickey 1978 – 2004. 26 years of age. I wonder what he did for a living. One of the thousands of Sydney-siders pulling beers and stuffing envelopes? Or one of the professionals, tie hanging loose after five like a man on the run from the gallows? Did he collect and hoard his bus tickets? Scrawl in the margins of his books as he read? Did he shop for the week or the night? Fill out a slouching form at a hotel bar? All the idiosyncrasies of his lifetime tumbled off the cliff with him and I wonder what they looked like, packed together in this man. And I wonder what it was that made him jump that day.

The first recorded suicide here was that of Ann Langton. She lost her small nephew to the Gap shortly before her suicide, a young boy who went out to play on the cliffs at night and disappeared, washing up on the rocks several days later. She never recovered from the loss. On a Tuesday night Ann took a cab out to a friend’s hotel at the rocks, banged on the door, entered, spoke a few words to an old friend, passed through the kitchen at the back and disappeared over the edge of the cliff. Just like that. It was not until two days later that her body was recovered. These same rocks greedily collected 121 lives in 1857 when the clipper ship Dunbar wrecked here. Attempting to enter Sydney harbour in a heavy storm, the captain confused the north arm of the Gap for that of the harbour. The only survivor, James Johnson recalled it to the mayor. “The sea lifted her in, she almost immediately struck; the passengers, who had all been in bed, rushed up on deck in their nightdresses; their shrieks…the ladies asked the captain… if there was any hope. Almost immediately after the decks burst from the pressure of the water the ship was rent into a thousand pieces, and all on board… were hurried into the foaming and terrific sea.” Johnson spent a day stranded on these rocks. Battered by a relentless wash of water, clinging to a shelf a few metres above the swells. Presumably he lay and watched the rise and fall of the corpses from the ship and waited. After 24 hours he was rescued by an Icelander, Antonio Wollio, who happened to be walking past. When Wollio returned he collected a twelve-pound generosity from the stunned onlookers and disappeared.

There is a strong attraction to the danger of edges. The rush of the smallest shifting, the thrill of twisting one leg suddenly, the buckle of knees, the movement of your body in and out of balance. It’s almost sexual in its immediacy. The smallest details and distances fill your eyes and your skin feels every breeze and touch of sun. The rock beneath you shifts under a turning heel and you sway like a drunk. Vertigo demands you jump. Your fingers shake, your head thick with the gravity of the headiness of fear the thrill of a destructive, absolute choice. Vertigo is the contradiction of reason and lust, denial and destructive indulgence, the freedom that flows from passing beyond the edge, leaving yourself behind, crouched on a ledge or tree branch and falling into anonymity. It’s in that battle of instinct and reason that everything remotely interesting in life ever happens. Everything feels still while you fall. Then gravity catches up with you and all the weight of your past flattens you onto the rocks.

From the vantage point of the top of the cliff the South Pacific stretches out before you. But at your back the city is a combination of the sheen of neon and the epileptic movement of city traffic of a society in frenzy. At 33 degrees Celsius the smell of condensed people clings with your sweat, the moisture of intimacy lying on strangers. Turn back to the sea and there is only space. You sweat cleanly in the sea breeze. Out on the chopped confetti of white tipped waves a low-flying trio of seagulls skim the ocean as if dancing. You forget all about their moronic up-close fish and chip glutting siblings that squawk and steal and bicker. Below, Watson’s Bay is settling comfortably into dusk, with covers of reggae music and the chink of glasses among the twisting jowls of the affluent as they gorge. The impulse to jump fades with the sun, turning the air around you to blank shadows, the South Pacific hushing against the cliff. Back at the ferry the silence of the day has emptied you out and keeps you numb amongst the chatting tourists.