(It is better if you probe a little further, for there are shearing sheds and jolly girls with ostrich plumes and Neapolitan violets; pictures with names like ‘Sadder than a Single Star that Sets at Twilight in a Vale of Leaves’. There are nymphs and pipes of Pan and ‘How We Lost Poor Flossie’.)

I came out with a pain in my back from all the vastness, dragging my feet. Further along the terrace were the spires of the University and the dome of the Art School, bristling with rococo cast-iron and Virginia creeper turning red. We saw art students come out with dandelion beards and skirts hemmed with safety pins. We flopped on the grass beside the pigeons and shop assistants with brown-paper lunches.

(At the far end of North Terrace, past Parliament House, is the Railway Station. Its round clock below the neon-lit Penfold’s sign has hands that mark the hours jerkily, always two minutes ahead of time. There is a flight of steps specked with fairy-dust.)

Sometimes when we came back from Semaphore in the train we went out the back way, through catacombs of forgotten offices and lavatories reeking with disinfectant, where a long mirror reflected the images of prinking girls down from the country. The collection baskets of the Methodist Mission and the Sisters of Mercy, the Salvation Army and Home for the Aged were there; it was gloomy and echoing and grubby — different from the ticket offices and the chromium counter where you bought tea and yo-yo biscuits and finger-buns.

We walked past the City Baths. Across the road was the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden; the toy cannons and clockwork soldiers, palm-trees and gravel square of the Parade Ground. Below us was the Torrens that wound up from the weir to become a tame lake where swans and row-boats and the ferry Popeye plied. Above our heads a pale figure in black trunks dived from the high tower, and water sprayed in an arc. On the lawns multi-coloured blossoms and buds rose to become mothers and children. Beside the chinoiserie bandstand, the greenness was blighted by the scarecrow shapes of metho drinkers. Far across the river, past the trees and pampas-grass, were golf-links and tennis-courts. Farther away still, was the Adelaide Oval, flecked, according to season, with flannelled cricketers or stripe-guernseyed footballers.

(And beyond the golf-links and tennis-courts and the Oval, near the apricot cathedral of St. Peter, is Montefiore Hill. Here, ringed with neatly-clipped conifers, is Colonel William Light, the Eurasian son of a Malayan princess, founder of this White Australian city. He perches high on his pink marble pedestal, and points towards the sky.)

The river wound on through rose gardens, under the elegant criss-cross of the University footbridge. It drifted to Hackney where it became a wild river lapped by reeds and parklands and the Zoological Gardens. Pine-trees shed needles and frilled brown cones under braided willows. The steep banks were encrusted with the snake-roots of Moreton Bay figs.

(At night, when the lamps on the footbridge are reflected like mother-of-pearl buttons in the river, the dark patches under the pines and the willows and the figs come alive. The mothers and children are gone, the prim paths and rustic benches belong to a tattered army of drinkers, glint-eyed voyeurs, and these others — betrayed by the patches of damp on their clothes, the smell of crushed leaves in their hair.)