Free Tamam Shud by Kerry Greenwood

the plate, the first chargrill I ever tasted.
    I used to buy a steak and a glass of red wine and eat my way through that steak, nibbling and nibbling until I had absorbed it all. Every meaty morsel. Every proteinladen bite. Then I would stagger back to the hotel, have another bath out of sheer swank, and next morning eat the hotel breakfast and get on the train for Melbourne.
    That used to be all I would see of Adelaide, although later, when I had friends in the town, I used to go there for fun, because I had made enough money folk singing and cleaning houses to tide me over the holidays. That first brief glimpse had told me Adelaide was a big, sleepy country town, not unpleasant or unfriendly. But my dad’s stories told me different. Adelaide, he said, had a dark underside. Children vanished there. Strange things happened. He always told me to be very careful in Adelaide.
    The first thing a native of Adelaide tells you proudly is that Adelaide was built without convicts. All volunteers, free settlers, not like your grimy crime-ridden hovels. It’s named after a queen. (No sniggering there at the back,please). It’s clean, planned and bright, with Colonel Light on his pedestal in the middle, supervising the activities of the devout citizenry. It’s the City of Churches.
    And yet. Colonel Light’s statue is not in the middle of the city – he’s at the top of it, in North Adelaide. The city has no heart. The reason why it is a city of churches is not that the citizenry is necessarily devout but that, historically, Adelaide was settled by large numbers of protestant sects, who would arrive, build a church, have a schism and then build another church down the road, within convenient sneering distance of the unenlightened original. It’s like the joke about the Welsh Robinson Crusoe, who is finally found and exhibits the town he has built out of bamboo to his rescuers. There is the town hall, the bakery, the fish shop and two chapels. ‘Why two chapels?’ asks the rescuer (obviously English or he wouldn’t need to ask). ‘That’s the one I don’t go to,’ says Taffy the Shipwrecked.
    And so it was in Adelaide. There are the beautiful main churches and, in the back streets, there are the rusty tin sheds of the others. This, oddly enough, made it a progressive city. Protestant progressives of the time wanted to free the slaves and bring about peace on earth and good will to all men, even if they were female. Women in South Australia got the vote in 1894, including indigenous women, at a time when Aborigines were not counted in the census and did not have the vote anywhereelse. South Australians also invented a very sensible system of land holdings called the Torrens System, which was adopted all over Australia and made life as an articled clerk bearable. (Old law title searches were murder and got parchment fragments all over your clothes. Until you’ve tried to get powdered vellum out of a white shirt you haven’t laundered.) Anything that has been tried out in Adelaide and accepted, from legislative changes to new salad dressings of a major fast-food chain, will be acceptable to the rest of the country. If it fails in Adelaide, it will fail in the rest of Australia.
    Adelaide elected Don Dunstan, for God’s sake.
    What a man! Others have spoken lovingly of his iconic pink shorts. His tendency to wear a Greek tunic while playing the piano. His easy familiarity with people who were not white and protestant, partly because of his birth in Fiji. His comfort with his own sexuality. His defeat and his death were tragic and heroic. Not to mention a few minor law reforms, like the appointment of Australians as governor, first Mark Oliphant and then Doug Nicholls, who was also the first indigenous governor; the first woman appointed to the supreme court, Roma Mitchell; the declaration of native title; the extension of shopping hours; and the decriminalisation of