The contentment we felt in Australia was compounded by our finding an exceptional place to live. This was in what can only be called a village (although the word seems inappropriate), then on the very edge of Melbourne's continuing expansion into the surrounding bush. We met there an old Australian who wanted to rent a house he had built himself. It was a simple, single-storied affair, but it stood on a hill from where there were no other buildings in sight, and was surrounded by about an acre of land. At the bottom of the hill, just beyond our entrance posts, was a stream and a track known as Gold Memorial Road. The memorial in question celebrated the first gold strike in the area and, while we were living there, people would still occasionally turn up to pan the stream, with very modest results. The house had a primitive wood-burning kitchen range for cooking but the landlord took pity on my wife and installed an electric stove. Water came from a tank outside which he warned us not to jump into, should we find ourselves caught in a bush-fire. If we did, he explained, we would be boiled like an egg. We gained some sense of why this should be so when, in the colder season, we put sodden eucalyptus branches on our open fire and saw how quickly they released their petrol and exploded into flame. When a bush fire did run through the village, it avoided our hill but not a friend's house lower down which it reduced to a few bits of blackened, twisted metal from the washing machine.

Living where we did meant that we could keep a dog. Otto was a collie/German shepherd cross we had as a puppy but never managed to train properly. His finest hour came one very wet day when we were surprised to see a four-by-four, too shiny and big to belong to any of our friends, making its way very slowly up the curves in our stony path. Out of it stepped two spruce looking men from Utah whom our dog greeted in his usual friendly way by putting his muddy paws all over their smart new suits. The ensuing discussion confirmed that elementary principle of literary criticism: that no profitable exchange can take place without agreement over basic premises.