There’s a good pioneer museum at Tanunda, housed in the old telegraph office. We spent an hour or so here, looking at sepia photographs of soberly industrious Lutheran families, the founders of the industry that keeps half of Australia semi-permanently drunk and idle. And we spent a further twenty minutes trying to get away from the curious lady at the enquiry desk and book counter who reversed the usual procedure and demanded information from us. ‘Where do you come from?’ she wanted to know. ‘How long have you been away? How can you afford such a long trip? Have you resigned your jobs? What are your jobs?’

We walked out on her in the end; we simply had to turn our backs on her and leave. Then we bought ourselves some sour black bread and wurst and drove out through Bethany to Menglers Hill, where we picnicked in German style and looked down over the valley. The view was not breathtaking; perhaps it was not even beautiful. But it satisfied all the quieter emotions and went well with our lunch. It was a view of sober and successful industry in a restful spot. The vines themselves, heavy with fruit at this time of the year, soothed the eyes. Nature was not turbulent or stimulating here, but calming and provident.

The township of Bethany was where it had all begun, twenty-eight Lutheran families arriving in 1842 and dividing the land up exactly as they would have done in Silesia, in the traditional hufendorf method of narrow, elongated allotments which gave the maximum access to tracks and creeks to the maximum number of settlers. So today Bethany is whatever you see on either side of one long quiet road running up into the hills – a few stone houses, some barns, a church, the smallest hotel in South Australia, the smallest vineyard in the Barossa, and the pioneer cemetery. We lingered among the graves for a while, as had become our wont, and thought what a comforting place it was, all things considered, not only on account of its rural beneficence and the giant river gum which guarded it, but even more because the dead were allowed to lie so close to where they’d lived and worked. They were in the village still, and could smell the grapes. Where the cemetery ended, there the vines resumed. Between the past and the present, and the quick and the dead, there seemed to be some rational and amicable compact. So might a book drudge like myself, I reasoned, be spared the terrors of too peaceful a resting place by being buried under the forecourt of the British Museum.