Sydney was immediately and gloriously attractive, a marvellous technicolour relief after a grey postwar decade: flawless blue skies, palm and flame trees, yellow beaches, and, not least, plenty of red meat and fruit. But initially it was also lonely, isolated and strange. We knew no one. The landscape was utterly different from anything we were accustomed to. There was not another country within 1200 miles, and not even another sizable city within 600. The politics were strange and harsh, involving Catholics and communists as major actors in a way that was more European than British. (The Australian Labor Party had spilt along these lines the previous year, which was to keep it out of power for nearly two decades.) The newspapers were dull and parochial. Literary-political magazines were few and hardly readable. The most conspicuous of them was the antediluvian and xenophobic Bulletin, a survivor from the late nineteenth century that still carried the slogan “Australia for the White People” on its masthead.