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I read A Town Like Alice when I was a boy in England and despite Nevil Shute’s detailed description of the beautiful but harsh and challenging Gulf Country I had great difficulty in bomb-damaged south London in picturing the scenery. But I wanted to know where the town was, what it would be like walking the streets and what sort of people lived there.
When I emigrated to Queensland in 1982 in my late 30s I was still intrigued by the story. I still wanted to know where the town like Alice was and how it had fared since Shute had painted such an evocative picture of it.
So I’ve written a small book about the search and the clues which reveal the real identity of Willstown, the name Shute gave to the tiny town shimmering in the vast, golden-grassed tropical savannah of northern Australia.
The story of wartime atrocities, privation, resilience and courage; of love between a tough Aussie cattleman and a city-dwelling English secretary; and of her determination to create jobs in a stagnating outback town is one of our most-loved novels and is still selling 70 years after being published.
While Alice Springs and many other locations, such as Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges and Hardy’s Wessex, have prospered from tourists’ cash by trading on their literary heritage, the town like Alice has failed to recognise and benefit from its heritage.
Instead of staking its claim to fame and reaping the tourism benefits from people seeking out the ‘town like Alice’, the local council advertises on its website a list of “tourist attractions” which includes ‘19th century cast iron gutter covers’ in its streets, a boat ramp and a 1960s road bridge so faulty that it is now only fit for anglers.
On one of my first visits there was even a mayor who vehemently denied that the town could be the town Shute described.
Ironically, Alice Springs, which only features in about half a dozen pages of the book, has capitalised on Shute’s story with the help of the worldwide Nevil Shute Norway Foundation (Norway was Shute’s real surname).
It was Alice Springs which hosted the Australian premiere of the 1956 film of A Town Like Alice rather than the town itself.
The foundation held its 2007 biennial conference in Alice Springs, aiding the thriving town’s economy, rather than in the tiny town like Alice that still needs all the help it can get.
Thanks to the foundation, Alice Springs’ main library, the Nevil Shute Memorial Library, has a permanent display of all his works – The Nevil Shute Collection. In 2007 Alice Springs Mayor Fran Kilgariff opened the $23,000 Nevil Shute Memorial Garden as a centrepiece of the library’s courtyard.
Yet the town like Alice did not even have a copy of Shute’s homage in its library when I last visited.
December 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of Shute’s feat in piloting his tiny wooden Percival Proctor plane halfway across the world from England into far north Queensland, literally out of the blue, and collecting the stories of local cattleman and former prisoner-of-war Jimmy Edwards to use as an integral part of his enduring story.
It’s an appropriate time to solve the mystery of the town’s identity by sifting the evidence and to examine how the town has dealt with the challenges Shute identified: isolation, lack of shops, no radio or newspapers, no employment apart from the cattle industry, and single women leaving Queensland’s isolated Gulf Country for a more glamorous life on the coast, resulting in many young men following them.
In the novel former Aussie prisoner-of-war Joe Harman (the Jimmy Edwards-inspired character) has been reunited with Jean Paget, the English rose. He fears she will not be able to settle in the tiny, isolated town near the cattle station he runs – an understandable worry when you consider that even now the 140,000 square kilometres of Burke, Carpentaria, Croydon and Doomadgee Shires, which comprise Queensland’s Gulf Country, are sparsely populated. It’s an area bigger than England with its population of about 55 million but here, at the last count, even if everyone’s at home there are less than 4000 people - one for every 34 square kilometres. That’s one person in an area the size of the London borough of Wandsworth or the Australian city of Armidale.
And it’s still a long trek from anywhere, being more than 2,000 kilometres from the Queensland capital of Brisbane – about the same distance from London to Bucharest, Romania, five countries and the English Channel away from the UK.
So for anyone contemplating following Shute’s meanderings and discovering the real town like Alice I’ve included a detailed description of the route from Cairns to the Gulf Country, together with attractions along the way which might entice visitors to spend weeks rather than days in making the journey.
Discovering The Real Town Like Alice available as an ebook on Amazon.com.au https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07JKRHL3X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540091702&sr=8-1&keywords=town+like+alice+bishop
When I emigrated to Queensland in 1982 in my late 30s I was still intrigued by the story. I still wanted to know where the town like Alice was and how it had fared since Shute had painted such an evocative picture of it.
So I’ve written a small book about the search and the clues which reveal the real identity of Willstown, the name Shute gave to the tiny town shimmering in the vast, golden-grassed tropical savannah of northern Australia.
The story of wartime atrocities, privation, resilience and courage; of love between a tough Aussie cattleman and a city-dwelling English secretary; and of her determination to create jobs in a stagnating outback town is one of our most-loved novels and is still selling 70 years after being published.
While Alice Springs and many other locations, such as Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges and Hardy’s Wessex, have prospered from tourists’ cash by trading on their literary heritage, the town like Alice has failed to recognise and benefit from its heritage.
Instead of staking its claim to fame and reaping the tourism benefits from people seeking out the ‘town like Alice’, the local council advertises on its website a list of “tourist attractions” which includes ‘19th century cast iron gutter covers’ in its streets, a boat ramp and a 1960s road bridge so faulty that it is now only fit for anglers.
On one of my first visits there was even a mayor who vehemently denied that the town could be the town Shute described.
Ironically, Alice Springs, which only features in about half a dozen pages of the book, has capitalised on Shute’s story with the help of the worldwide Nevil Shute Norway Foundation (Norway was Shute’s real surname).
It was Alice Springs which hosted the Australian premiere of the 1956 film of A Town Like Alice rather than the town itself.
The foundation held its 2007 biennial conference in Alice Springs, aiding the thriving town’s economy, rather than in the tiny town like Alice that still needs all the help it can get.
Thanks to the foundation, Alice Springs’ main library, the Nevil Shute Memorial Library, has a permanent display of all his works – The Nevil Shute Collection. In 2007 Alice Springs Mayor Fran Kilgariff opened the $23,000 Nevil Shute Memorial Garden as a centrepiece of the library’s courtyard.
Yet the town like Alice did not even have a copy of Shute’s homage in its library when I last visited.
December 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of Shute’s feat in piloting his tiny wooden Percival Proctor plane halfway across the world from England into far north Queensland, literally out of the blue, and collecting the stories of local cattleman and former prisoner-of-war Jimmy Edwards to use as an integral part of his enduring story.
It’s an appropriate time to solve the mystery of the town’s identity by sifting the evidence and to examine how the town has dealt with the challenges Shute identified: isolation, lack of shops, no radio or newspapers, no employment apart from the cattle industry, and single women leaving Queensland’s isolated Gulf Country for a more glamorous life on the coast, resulting in many young men following them.
In the novel former Aussie prisoner-of-war Joe Harman (the Jimmy Edwards-inspired character) has been reunited with Jean Paget, the English rose. He fears she will not be able to settle in the tiny, isolated town near the cattle station he runs – an understandable worry when you consider that even now the 140,000 square kilometres of Burke, Carpentaria, Croydon and Doomadgee Shires, which comprise Queensland’s Gulf Country, are sparsely populated. It’s an area bigger than England with its population of about 55 million but here, at the last count, even if everyone’s at home there are less than 4000 people - one for every 34 square kilometres. That’s one person in an area the size of the London borough of Wandsworth or the Australian city of Armidale.
And it’s still a long trek from anywhere, being more than 2,000 kilometres from the Queensland capital of Brisbane – about the same distance from London to Bucharest, Romania, five countries and the English Channel away from the UK.
So for anyone contemplating following Shute’s meanderings and discovering the real town like Alice I’ve included a detailed description of the route from Cairns to the Gulf Country, together with attractions along the way which might entice visitors to spend weeks rather than days in making the journey.
Discovering The Real Town Like Alice available as an ebook on Amazon.com.au https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07JKRHL3X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1540091702&sr=8-1&keywords=town+like+alice+bishop
