There are cockatoos in the trees here, white with yellow crests, and noisy devils! They eat the plums from our garden and stare at us with bold, black eyes. Koalas, sweet as pie, curl up in the boughs of giant gums, endlessly sleeping, like old men after Sunday dinner. The spiders are as big as a man’s hand, spread out flat. Imagine that! But they’re not the ones to worry about – the killers are the redbacks, much, much smaller, but lethal when rattled. Kalvin says always look in the mailbox before putting your hand in!

As for the heat! The grass in our back yard steams in the mornings as the sun comes up and sometimes the road starts to melt! We grow flowers, though. Poinciana do well, but so do petunias and humble pansies, if they get plenty to drink. But the dust puffs up round my feet when I’m gardening and even though the desert’s a long drive away, somehow it looms, hot and red, and I never forget it’s there.

This is a wonderful country, Catherine, a lucky country, and you’ll know what I mean when you come to visit. Do come!

Those words lived with Alison, once she’d heard Peter read them. And you’ll know what I mean when you come to visit. Did this person, Sheila, expect them? Might Alison and Peter be given the chance to grow up in a faraway place called Elizabeth, instead of Attercliffe? Peter didn’t know, and their mother couldn’t be asked: not this, nor anything else. Catherine Connor had no patience for questions. They reminded her of her responsibilities.

So these memories, all of them, the pleasure and the pain, bloomed in Ali Connor’s mind every time a journalist, interviewing her about her new success, asked what had brought her to Adelaide. The climate, she’d say. The Adelaide Hills, the gracious city, the infinite ocean, the food, the rainbow-coloured parrots, the luminous sun-flooded early mornings, the inky nights, the space to write. And all these things were reasons she’d stayed, but none of them were why she’d come. She’d always kept those to herself, hadn’t told her husband, hadn’t even told Cass Delaney, who thought she knew every secret skeleton in Ali’s closet. They were sitting together in a café in North Adelaide, reunited after Cass’s working week in Sydney, and she’d heard Ali three times today already, twice on the telly on News Breakfast and Sunrise, and once on the radio, and soon Ali’d be back at the ABC studios for a pre-record with the BBC. Cass was buzzing from it all, getting a huge vicarious kick from her friend’s moment under the media gaze – but why, she wanted to know, did Ali always sound so bloody cagey?

‘All those platitudes!’ Cass said now. ‘Just quit the crap about the scenery, it makes you sound pretentious.’