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.As you can imagine, he did not notablyenrich the intellectual vigor of South Australia.Then in 1968 thestate elected a youthful and charismatic Labor premier namedDon Dunstan, and almost at once Adelaide and South Australiaunderwent a transformation.The city became a haven for artistsand intellectuals.The Adelaide Festival blossomed into the na-tion s preeminent cultural event.Books that were still bannedelsewhere in Australia Portnoy s Complaint and Naked Lunch,for example were freely available in Adelaide.Nude bathingbeaches were allowed.Homosexuality was legalized.For onegiddy decade or so, Adelaide was the hippest city in the countrythe San Francisco of the Antipodes.In 1979 Dunstan s wife died and he abruptly retired from poli-tics.Adelaide lost its momentum and began a gentle descent intoobscurity.The artists and intellectuals drifted away; even Dunstanmoved to Victoria.Under Playford South Australia had beenbackward but interestingly so.Under Dunstan it was racy and ex-hilaratingly so.The real problem with Adelaide these days, I sus-pect, is that it has just stopped being interesting.Still, it s a lovely place for an amble on a summer s day.I madea couple of small purchases in the bookshop an old hardbackcalled Australian Paradox, which I bought for no more solid reasonthan that I rather liked the cover and it was attractively priced at 124 B i l l B r y s o ntwo dollars, and a more recent volume entitled Crocodile Attackin Australia, which was nearly ten times dearer but had the com-pensating virtue of containing a great many gruesome anecdotesthen wandered off for a hike through the city s green and commo-dious parks.Central Adelaide boasts almost eighteen hundred acres ofparks, less than Canberra, but a great deal more than most othercities of its size.As so often in Australia, they reflect an effort to re-create a familiarly British ambience in an antipodean setting.Of allthe things people longed for when they first came to Australia, anEnglish backdrop was perhaps the most outstanding.It is notable,when you look at early paintings of the country, how awkward,how strikingly un-Australian, the landscape so often appears.Eventhe gum trees look unusually lush and globular, as if the artistswere willing them to take on a more English aspect.Australia wasa disappointment to the early settlers.They ached for English airand English vistas.So when they built their cities, they laid themout with rolling English-style parks arrayed with stands of oak,beech, chestnut, and elm in a way that recalled the dreamily bucolicefforts of Humphry Repton or Capability Brown.Adelaide is thedriest city in the driest state in the driest continent, but you wouldnever guess it from wandering through its parks.Here it is foreverSussex.Unfortunately such arrangements are out of fashion in thehorticultural world.Since many of the original plantings are nowcoming to the end of their natural lives, the park authorities haveinstituted plans to sweep away the intruder species and re-create ariverine landscape dominated by mallee scrub and red river gumsof the sort that existed here naturally before Europeans camealong.Heartwarming though it is to see Australians taking pridein their native flora, the plan seems unfortunate, to say the least.To begin with, Australia has several hundred thousand squaremiles of landscape featuring mallee scrub and red river gums;it is not as if this is a threatened environment.Worse, the parksas they are now are unusually fine, among the best in the world,and it would be a tragedy to lose them wherever they were.Ifyou accept the logic that they are inappropriate because they are ina European style, then clearly you would have to get rid of allof Adelaide s houses, streets, buildings, and European-derived I n a S u n b u r n e d C o u n t r y 125people.Unfortunately, as so often in a shortsighted world, no oneasked me about any of this.Still, the parks remain lovely for the moment and I was happyto pass into them now.They were packed with large family groupsenjoying Australia Day, picnicking and playing cricket with tennisballs.Adelaide has miles of good beaches in its western suburbs, soit surprised me that such numbers of people had forsaken the shoreto come into the city.It gave the day an engagingly old-fashionedair.This is how we spent the Fourth of July when I was a kid inIowa in parks, playing ball games.It seemed odd, too but againpleasing that in a country of so much space people chose tocrowd together to relax.Perhaps it s all that intimidating empti-ness that makes Australians such social creatures.The parks wereso crowded, in fact, that it was often impossible to tell which ballgame belonged to which group of onlookers, or even sometimeswhich fielders belonged to which ball game.When a ball bouncedinto a neighboring party, as seemed to happen quite regularly,there was always an exchange of apologies on the one hand and acall of No worries on the other as the ball was tossed back intoplay.It was effectively all one very large picnic, and I felt almostridiculously pleased to be part of it even in such a marginal way.It took about three hours, I suppose, to do the complete circuitof the parks.Quite often a roar would rise from the Oval.Cricketwas obviously a livelier spectacle in person than on the radio.Atlength I emerged onto a street called Pennington Terrace, where arow of neat bluestone houses with shady lawns overlooked theOval.At one a family had essentially moved its living room ontothe front lawn.I know it can t have been, but in my recollectionthey had brought out everything floor lamps, coffee table, arearug, magazine basket, coal scuttle.They had certainly brought outa sofa and a television on which they were watching the cricket.Behind the television, a couple of hundred yards away across openparkland, stood the Oval, so that whenever anything dramatichappened on their screen it was accompanied in real time by a roarfrom the stadium just beyond. Who s winning? I called as I walked past. Bloody poms, the man said, inviting me to share his amaze-ment.I trudged on uphill past the imposing hulk of St.Peter s 126 B i l l B r y s o nCathedral.I was heading in a general way toward my hotel, in-tending to have a shower and a change of clothes before setting offto look for a pub and dinner.Out of the shade of the parks, it was ablisteringly hot afternoon, and I was by now quite footsore, but Ifound myself drawn helplessly into the residential streets of NorthAdelaide.It was an area of quiet prosperity, settled under a Sundayserenity, with street after street of old houses, each buried underroses and frangipani, and every little plot a model of meticulouslymanaged floral abundance.At length I arrived at a place called Wellington Square, anopen space overlooked by a grand pub of venerable aspect.I wentstraight over
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