Monument to Robert O’Hara Burke & William John Wills (d 1861), explorers of the Australian Outback, General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia

As I flew out of Australia, wishing there were such things as child-free planes, I started to read Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963;  Penguin 2006), which for its periodic sentences, its allusions to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and its finely poised irony deserves the epithet “magisterial”.

By reading the historical context I’m slowly beginning to understand a little of what I’ve seen.  I begin to see how each of the states came to adopt its own attitude to the others, how development was bedevilled by inter-state disagreements, from differing railway gauges up to the vehement present-day disputes about water distribution, how the different “interests” of the emerging nation – colonialists, convicts, settlers, squatters, Protestants and Catholics – set up a network of snobberies that governed politics for generations, how the utter inability to reach out to the Aborigines and the effects of the explicit early twentieth-century policy of “White Australia” are still not fully resolved.

I can’t presume to make judgements about any of these matters, but as I become aware of them I see how fascinating this great nation has been and is.

Almost without exception the Australians I met were charming, open, keen to share the delights of their country.  I talked to a man in a coffee shop who came from Dundee, was demobbed from the British Army in Malaya, came to Australia for a couple of years and stayed:  he’d travelled from Brisbane to a sports event in Melbourne on his pensioner’s entitlement of four free rail-tickets a year, and was looking forward to a cruise from Fremantle to Plymouth, England, which he said would take the Biblical forty days and forty nights.

Post-1960s multiculturalism now means that people of any ethnicity may be in fact Australian.  An African taxi-driver compared at length the land-use in Western Australia with Kenya and Uganda and the resultant effect on lifestyles.  An Indian lady in a lift described the weather as “muggy”, and when I remarked that was an English expression said her grandparents were indeed English.  Oriental hotel receptionists greet you with “G’day”.

Over my three weeks’ travel I’ve come to associate the Australian accent with honesty, cheerfulness and an interest in other people.  In my experience, it goes with unabashed eye-contact, straightforwardness and a desire to please.  To me it’s inimitable:  at least, I can’t work out how to change a simple syllable like “No” into “Niye”.

I can’t wait to come back.

St Kilda Pier, Melbourne, Australia

St Kilda is lively at night, and laid back by day.  It’s so easy to nip down there by tram from the centre of Melbourne that I took to eating breakfast and an evening meal there.  On Sunday morning there is a craft market.  When I return to Melbourne next I’ll seriously consider staying in St Kilda rather than in Melbourne itself.

It has three living monuments to the history of entertainment – the Palais Theatre, Luna Park and the St Kilda Pier.

The pier has a chequered history.  The original timber jetty was replaced by the present concrete structure on a slightly different alignment.  The charming and much loved pavilion, known locally as the “kiosk”, was destroyed by fire in 2003, and as a result of vehemently expressed public opinion was rebuilt in its original form, with a cool, glass-fronted modern extension behind which houses Little Blue [www.stkildapierkiosk.com.au].  Here you can eat either in air-conditioned comfort or wafted by natural breezes:  I had a restorative risotto, while others around me tucked into Sunday brunch.

Beyond the pier and its kiosk is a breakwater, part of which is fenced off as a wildlife reserve.

I liked The St Kilda Pelican [16 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, 3182 VIC] for its intriguing wooden veranda with circular openings through which to see and be seen, its relaxed, sunny, morning atmosphere, and its eggs Florentine for breakfast.

There’s a plethora of choices for an evening-meal venue at St Kilda Beach.  I stumbled upon The Street Café [www.thestreetcafe.com.au] which I enjoyed so much I made a second visit.  This return visit showed that what I thought was pumpkin and lamb soup the first time was in fact pumpkin and lime.  (I still have trouble with Australian vowels.)  The service at The Street Café is highly polished, and it’s possible to sit by the window watching the people go past in the evening sun.  Food and entertainment is what the seaside should be about.

Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs is seriously hot, heading towards 36°C as I stood in the station yard waiting for the most charming bus driver I have ever met to check in his passengers for the shuttle into town.

The drive between hotels crosses several watercourses:  each of them has all the paraphernalia of bridges, cutwaters and culverts, yet consists entirely of sand, dotted with opportunistic grass and trees, indicating that water is present below the river bed.

Alice Springs people tell of sudden flash floods, the most recent in January 2009, when no rain fell in the town but a storm further north sent so much water that houses in the Casino district had to be sandbagged.  When you ask Alice people about the last time it rained, they tend to mention years, like 2000 and 1988, though in fact a few inches falls each year.  Their idea of a drought appears to be anything up to a decade.

Elsewhere in Australia, farmers and local governments contend with the ironies of the climate:  I repeatedly read newspaper reports of farmers in one place rejoicing because their land was replenished by rainstorms while others desperately wondered how many months they could hold out in the drought;  in different parts of the country, authorities battle with flood disasters whilst elsewhere they squabble over apportioning available supplies.

For a town that didn’t exist until the early 1870s and only gained a rail connection in 1929, Alice Springs is extremely proud of its heritage.  There are tours of the Royal Flying Doctor Service [http://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/about-us/visitor-centres/vc-co], tracing the origins and development of a quintessentially Australian enterprise, without which much of the remote regions could not have developed, and the Telegraph Station Historical Reserve [http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/parks/find/astelegraphstation.html], now a historic monument that shows where, how and why the location was first colonised by white settlers:  the original “spring” is actually a waterhole on the Todd River – Alice was in fact the wife of the postmaster-general of South Australia, Sir Charles Todd (1826-1910).

While I was in Alice Springs I bought Doris Blackwell’s Alice…on the line (apparently co-written with Douglas Lockwood 1965), an account of growing up there between 1899 and 1908 when her father was officer-in-charge of the telegraph station.  For a reader who has travelled to Alice Springs overland in the comfort of The Ghan and experienced the summer heat there, it starkly focuses the imagination on the conditions endured by the men who laid out and built the telegraph line and the families who came to this desolate and beautiful place to work and live.

On a Tailormade Tours half-day tour with an excellent driver/guide called Graeme, I also visited the Alice Springs Reptile Centre [http://www.reptilecentre.com.au], and met a two-foot lizard called Fred who ambles about the place getting under people’s feet, and drove to the top of ANZAC Hill, the vantage point that reveals the geography of the place, located on a narrow gap in the MacDonnell Range through which the railway and the road penetrate.

In a short stay I left interesting sites unseen, the Museum of Central Australia, the Old Ghan Museum & Heritage Railway, which runs a steam train along a surviving stretch of the narrow-gauge original line, and the National Road Transport Hall of Fame next door, housed in a hall big enough to contain a couple of road-trains and much else.

What I wouldn’t have missed, however, was the Outback Ballooning [http://www.outbackballooning.com.au] dawn flight over the outback, hosted by the inestimable pilot Frans and his driver Ron (apparently they swap roles from time to time).  A balloon flight is worth getting up before dawn for:  it offers time to see the night-sky in desert conditions, all the practical activity of inflating the balloon and, later, squashing it back into its five-foot-high carrier-bag, the eerie silence of drifting above the landscape with absolutely no sensation of vertigo, the entertainment of surprising kangaroos and horses going about their morning business and – since the route and destination are dictated by the wind – such points of local interest as the jail and the oil-refinery.

The champagne breakfast afterwards, a regular ballooning custom, was convivial:  the watermelon, chicken legs and pieces of quiche were washed down with champagne laced with apple and guava juice, a sort of antipodean Bucks Fizz, and the conversation warmed up considerably.  I spent the rest of the morning drinking strong coffee.

There’s enough to do in Alice Springs to while away several days:  in future I’d make a point of visiting in winter, when the temperature goes down to a cool 20°C.