Ros and I decided not to let not being Lutherans stop us from putting our nose into the Tanunda Oval that afternoon, where a BACK TO TANUNDA DAY, in celebration of South Australia’s 150th birthday, was in progress. This party seemed to have two distinct and sometimes contradictory elements. Around the peripheries of the playing field people in early German settlers’ dress were gathered, some of them looking defiantly natural, as is the way when you are costumed peculiarly, but others looking genuinely natural, as though this was how, spiritually anyway, they essentially saw themselves. In the oval proper, though, a general free-for-all seemed to be taking place, a sort of It’s a Knockout without any referee. I learnt from someone who might or might not have been an early Lutheran pig farmer that this was called the Participatory Games – you were awarded a signed certificate just for being in them. Had I not suddenly noticed a wine-tasting tent it’s just possible that I would have thrown off my jacket and participated, but the opportunity of making a few judicious assessments on a sticky afternoon was not really to be foregone. The more especially as there were only minutes left before the Tanunda Liedertafl Choir and the Tanunda Brass Band began their concert in the agricultural hall. A little something red and pungent from Yalumba, a little something even redder and more pungent from Peter Lehmann, and it was time to take our seats.

I’d read somewhere that the agricultural hall sometimes functioned as a giant church for star ecclesiastical performers, accommodating congregations of twelve or thirteen hundred. There weren’t that many here today, but we were still a sizeable audience for an aluminium shed with a gravel floor, and corn mice scuttling between the plastic chairs, alarmed, as indeed I was, by the music and the sentiment. I suppose I ought to have been pleased to get my German brass band at last, but it was too late for me – all I could see now were sleeping-car stewards. They went through the usual disheartening brass band routine of thinking to surprise you with what they could do with ‘pops’ – a spirited ‘Sweet Gingerbread Man’, a less banal but still banal medley from Cats, and so on. Then they did something which in all truth was a surprise: they went straight from the ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ to the ‘Luftwaffe Theme’ from the film The Battle of Britain. They let it rip too, giving it plenty of martial swagger and air space. But it wasn’t that it should be played so feelingly that startled me, simply that it should be played at all. ‘Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink,’ the Liedertafl Choir, all neat in blue blazers and grey flannels, now rose and sang, which struck me as all very well, but. They didn’t win me over with, ‘In München steht ein Hofbrauhaus,’ either. It was only when they got to ‘Ich hatt’ einst ein schön’ Vaterland’ – the song of the migrant, the plaint of the forever exiled – that the tears sprung out of my eyes and I was every man’s brother once more.