“The light is all reddish honey, a golden glow that invites nostalgia as we stroll eastwards through the inner-city streets. [...] [W]ithin an hour we are walking through the high gates of its main Academy, beneath a school motto wrought in iron: Veritas vos liberabit.

'Work makes free,' I mistranslate.

Lucy laughs. 'You sound ambivalent.'

'I was the scholarship boy. I didn't fit in.'

Inside the gates we find ourselves in a different, greener dimension where the city no longer exists.

'More Eton than Eton,' Lucy murmurs.

Eton in the afternoon flush of an Australian summer. Eton with parrots. The trees and playing-fields and old stone buildings appear sprinkled with gold, if here a softer gold, an unmetallic dust, lacking the hard edges of summer proper. More invitations to nostalgia? But if Adelaide Grammar School is another local francise of paradise, it is a complex paradise, part purgatory. [...] Old scholars' newletters--'Dear Old Blue'--tracked me down in London, relentlessly, even though I had never subscribed.”

“If the Adelaide Hills are paradise, then the city is its ante-room, and the winemaking valleys of Barossa and McLaren Vale its north and south wings, decorated in the same sky-blue and leaf-green colour scheme, and stylishly furnished with the same colonial stone buildings and vine rows and olive groves and giant river gums.

[...] Much has changed in ten years, if more in quantity than quality. [...]  [Adelaide's] thousand cafés and restaurants have become two thousand; her vineyards now have the suburbs besieged on three sides like the rank and file of a vast, green-uniformed army. On the fourth side lies the sea. We lunch in wineries listening to string quartets and counter-lunch in pubs listening to poets. We fish-and-chip in coastal cafés and browse in bookshops; we escape the midsummer heat in the cool of cinemas; we pore over competing portraits of the city displayed in her libraries and galleries. Athens or Detroit? Retirement Heaven or Serial Murder City? Clochemerle or Wine Capital of the World?”

“There might be higher mountains on the planet than the Adelaide Hills, but they are no closer to heaven. Each valley is a little deeper and greener than the last, and each ridge, a little higher and bluer, seems another step in some sort of ascension. Even the names of the steps have a heavenly sound; Lucy speaks the words softly as the freeway exits slide past, big-print, white on green. Littlehampton. Oakbank. Aldgate. Bridgewater.

Music to my ears. I might be hearing these familiar place names for the first time, the imported words back where they belong, melting on an English tongue.

[...] Each valley cups a single small town in its palm: a church spire, sometimes two, an old stone school, a single aisle of craft shops and Devonshire tea-rooms and petrol pumps.

Village is the better word for these untypical Australian towns, perhaps even hamlet [...]. 'Germans settled these areas. The church spires are all Lutheran. The names were changed after the war. Anglicised.'”

“[Martin describes the drive from the airport into Alice Springs]

Flat country crawls past, offering little distraction. A plain of red sand and white clay softened by mulga and spinifex. The occasional crooked line of paperbarks or coolibahs staking out the course of a dried creek bed. A breach in the orange hills appears; a gap enlarging as we approach, a great door opening. And suddenly we are through, driving along a wide river of sand lined by tall river gums. Alice Springs envelops us, a glitter of roofs and cars and motels and fast-food outlets in bright sunlight.”

“Bedford's voice rumbles again. 'You know that place, Mardin?'

A turn-off to the left; a red dirt track vanishing into dense scrub. A signpost: CONISTON.

'Should I?'

A whitefeller borrowed a blackfeller's woman over that way. Long time back. Before army time, you know?'

'Before the war?'

'Yuwayi. That whitefeller borrow two women, that Napurrula and her niece. Over that way, Coniston Station. Near the place we call Yurrkuru...'

He is telling me a story but it feels more like another interrogation. Paranoia? [...]

'That's okay. The whitefeller pay for those women. He give the husband, that Japanangka, and his cousin Japaljarri tucker. Hatchets. Bacca. They work for him, mustering camel.' He speaks slowly, with frequent pauses, the pace of his storytelling as leisurely as his driving. 'But the wives don't come back. The two blackfellers think about it. You borrow woman, Mardin, but not too long. Borrow too long, big trouble eh? They spear that whitefeller. Blackfeller way, Mardin. Payback. He keep those women too long.'

[...]

'What happened then? What happened to the, ah, blackfellers?'

The cigarette is lit, the story resumes. 'Big trouble, Mardin. This policeman name of Murray went all over the country killing people.' He aims his lips back over his shoulder. 'That way. He kill a big mob of blackfellers. But them two men who did the spearing, the Japanangka and his cousin, they run away. Live to old age. In the spinifex country. That way.'”

“'Germans settled these areas. The church spires are all Lutheran. The names were changed after the war. Anglicised.' 

Another exit catches her eye. 'Hahndorf kept its name?'

'Changed back again. For the tourist trade.'

'Don't spoil it for me Marty. It reminds me of home. It's not at all what I expected Australia to be like.'

'You expected desert?'

'I didn't expect an English country garden.'”