I had become a Canberran with solid bona-fides. I'd never contemplated permanently leaving the city to which I felt almost umbilically connected. And I'd finally seen it begin to thrive and blossom, partly consistent with Walter Griffin's original vision, despite all of its historic and ongoing impediments. I had even assumed that one day I'd be interred in the ground thereabouts.

Canberra was where I felt I belonged, the place that harboured me with safety, certainty and all the natural and intellectual beauty that had captivated and inspired me for so long.

You might live in the same house for twenty years and never find 'home'. Circumstances may never fortuitously align as they did for me in Canberra. You know when you've found the place where you want to end up. I've always thought that finding a precious connection to place, to a part of the country and its human and other creatures, is to be fully earthed, literally, figuratively. My circuitry felt complete in Canberra.

Home is also where your memories and your spirits dwell. Mine were - and mostly remain - in Canberra.

I try to view life as time and experience invested rather than 'spent'. And I invested twenty years in that city and the much-loved house, ramshackle and warm, that looked north across the treetops and the Limestone Plains. I wrote six books there, including this one, and millions more words besides, and raised children and dogs and nurtured friendships.

Three of our parents died while we lived there. My recollections of them are framed by that house, where they spent so much of their later years with us and their grandchildren and the dogs.

Memories of my parents and my mother-in-law (who could solve any maths homework problem, recite an obtuse Presbyterian hymn, oversee piano practice, do a load of washing all while carbonising my cooking pots as she made dinner for the kids) are nearly all set in that house and seeded across the city.

I wonder, now, what happens to our recollections and experiences and words, written and spoken - whether they will always belong to the place where they were created. Do the spirits of our dead continue to dance on the stages where our memories of them were made, and what happens to those spirits when we, the living, move on?

I return often, always with an eye for what's changed.

I think of the inscription on the pioneering Webb family's gravestone in St John's cemetery: For here we have no continuing city but seek one to come.

The city is arrived, just as it continues to shape-shift with ever-refined architectural and landscaped definition, social and cultural texture. Stage-one of a light-rail, drawn as a tramway a century ago in those stunning Marion Mahony-Griffin plans, now links Gungahlin to Civic. Medium-density apartments now trace a main northern entry into the city that was until recently block-after-block of run-down government housing reminiscent of outer-Minsk or -Vilnius.

The crane is king of the Canberra skyline as a combination of the urban medium-density residential, hospitality and retail buildings envisaged by the Griffins finally takes shape.

One street back, nestled amid yet more apartments, is Canberra's hipster Ground Zero: Braddon with its watering holes and eateries, its neon lights and music and people - people who bar-hop and dine at street-side tables and parade as the Griffins dreamed they should, European-style in sweltering, freezing, dusty (smoky) Antipodean Canberra. All in defiance of those fusty Anglophile planners who wanted none of that and nearly wrecked the infant capital with their obstinate wowser-ism!

But there is an onerous social reshaping and cost to some of the new inner-urban development. As we were preparing to leave the city, the developers were demolishing the vast estate of public housing on our doorstep. Over a decade or so 'the flats' - as everyone referred to them - diminished in their occupancy rates and physical condition. They were badly run-down, fewer families lived there and the estate was beset with social problems and crime (a number of rapes and violent deaths happened in the final years we lived nearby).

For twenty years the word had been out that when redeveloped the flats would be a mix of private and social housing. It's all being transformed into prime real estate, streets of million-dollar-plus dwellings - with not a single unit of social housing. And so, the most valuable, sought after parts of Canberra around the inner-north and -south will be largely devoid of government housing for the poor and less fortunate, most having been re-built on the city's outer-margins.

Australia's latest prime minister, the fifth since this book was published in 2012, is a former treasurer - just like another PM, Harold Holt. Frank Moorhouse characterised Holt with Exocet accuracy in his novel Cold Light, set in Canberra, as a man 'who had no smile, only a salesman's grin'.

This presciently - deliciously - befits the incumbent, an Olympic blusterer and obfuscator, Trumpian in his strategy of dismissing unwanted inquiry with crude distraction. Unwelcome questions exist, without warranting answer, he says, only in 'the Canberra bubble'. By which he seems to mean Parliament House, though his words are deliberately ambiguous to incorporate the whole city. That it demeans the polity, his office, the city, seems of little concern to the grinning salesman.

His is the type of primitive messaging about the capital's supposed detachment from Australian everyday life that's been levelled for political advantage at Canberra since long before the first parliament opened in 1927. And yet the city continues after a century of such dreary, cheap pejoratives.

At the northern end of Griffin's land axis another salesman, this one of gauche sentimentality, invited the arms manufacturers into the war memorial to sponsor the telling of the story it enshrines. The merchants of death coughed-up spare change to have their sponsorship plaques affixed to the walls of our secular shrine honouring those their weapons killed, closing the circle on the military-industrial-commemorative complex. Arms manufacturers further inflate the story of Anzac, as spun by the memorial's last director, at the expense of so much other history and national memory. Something else about Canberra to further break the peacenik Griffins' hearts ...

Just as well continental memory, one of the bedrocks of Canberra's national purpose, is so discerning. All sorts of hucksterism - mawkish, fearmongering, cheap, profligate, sentimental - makes its way across Canberra's stage. But it says something about the system to which Canberra is dedicated that the hucksters rarely win in the long run. They are subsumed into the broader narrative.

That's because the Australian story that Canberra serves reaches back sixty-thousand - perhaps even a hundred-thousand-plus - years. The continent has a long memory. The place that serves it best continues to do so, for all its beauty and pain.

When I finally understood that, the city made sense to me. The pieces fell into place and I live with that knowledge every day. I miss it now. But my experiences - my memories and my spirits - are still there in the ever-continuing city.