Australia is the broad geographical and cultural setting of the story, connecting Sydney’s affluent social world with the Blue Mountains, rural and coastal family histories, and the Whitsunday islands. Rather than functioning as a single backdrop, it supplies a sequence of contrasting spaces—urban, domestic, remote, maritime, and resort-like—in which Liz Montrose and Cameron Hillier’s relationship changes its meaning.

National and Social Setting

Australia first appears through the authorial background as the country in which Lindsay Armstrong lives, after being born in South Africa, with her New Zealand-born husband and five children. The novel itself is more specifically anchored in Sydney, where Liz Montrose shares a flat with Scout and Mary Montrose in an inner suburb. The home is comfortable because Mary has arranged it, although Mary frequently regrets that the neighbourhood is not particularly classy. Its practical advantages are more important than its prestige: it is close to Paddington, Oxford Street, fashionable shops, lively cafes, markets, historic terrace houses, the Victoria Army Barracks, the Sydney Cricket Ground, Centennial Park, and Moore Park, where the family often has picnics.

The flat also gives Australia a domestic, improvised scale that contrasts with the wealth surrounding Cameron Hillier. Its three bedrooms include a converted study used by Scout and a workroom for Mary. Mary’s room is crowded with colourful fabrics, buttons, beads, sequins, feathers, ribbons, and motifs, the remnants of her creative life after an unsuccessful boutique consumed most of her resources. Through this household, Australia is not only a country of prosperous estates and luxury travel but also a place of practical family arrangements and financial insecurity.

Landscapes and Regional Histories

The journey west from Sydney opens a different Australian register. As Cameron Hillier drives beyond Penrith, the road climbs into the Blue Mountains, whose blue haze is associated with oils released by the eucalyptus forests covering their slopes. Liz understands them as the rugged ramparts of a vast plateau, cut by gullies and ravines rather than simply as conventional mountains. Their beauty is awe-inspiring but also secretive, a quality reinforced by the history of the Wollemi pine, a living fossil that remained hidden in their remote valleys until 1994.

The Blue Mountains therefore combine scientific distinctiveness, geological scale, and narrative concealment. They mark the movement away from Sydney’s visible social codes toward a more secluded world, where Cameron can bring Liz to Yewarra and ask about her next assignment. The road does not merely transport her between locations; it changes the atmosphere of the relationship by carrying her out of the city and toward Cameron’s private domain.

Yewarra embodies another version of Australia: the cultivated rural estate. When Cameron welcomes Liz there, the grounds are filled with majestic trees, white and blue agapanthus, jasmine and honeysuckle climbing over jacarandas, and gardenias and roses. The garden is described as a riot of colour and perfume, and Cameron explains that it is a tribute to his mother’s love of gardens and her refined instincts, which survived the harsh life she shared with his father. The estate thus joins landscape to inheritance, presenting cultivation as a family memory and as a sign of social continuity.

Family, Class, and Mobility

Cameron’s family history expands the Australian map beyond Sydney and Yewarra. His father grew up in Cooktown in Far North Queensland on a cattle station, with the sea in his veins and the ambition to own a prawning fleet. His mother came from an impoverished but blue-blooded background. The couple appeared so unlikely to her family, the Hastings clan, that they were virtually cast off, except for Narelle Hastings, yet they remained deeply in love until they died together.

Their marriage crosses several Australian divides at once: inherited status and bush upbringing, the social world of the Hastings family and the working life of fishing boats, and the cultivated ideal of a gracious home and gardens against tropical heat, seasonal work, and unreliable catches. The family endured hard days at sea on boats smelling of fish and diesel, breakdowns, small catches, and periods when the vessels were laid up in Cooktown. Cameron’s mother made a home wherever they were, sometimes through something as modest as a hibiscus bloom in a glass or a small arrangement of shells. Australia consequently appears as a country where family identity is made across movement between regions and occupations rather than secured by one fixed social setting.

The same history also explains why Australian place is inseparable from class. The mother’s ancestry carries the memory of privilege, while the father’s origins connect Cameron to cattle, fishing, and the northern frontier. Their eventual success, represented by the original trawler Miss Miranda and the larger Miss Miranda II, turns labour and risk into inherited prosperity. Cameron’s paintings of horses, trawlers, and Shakespeare preserve that mixture of landscape, enterprise, family memory, and cultural aspiration.

Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Encounter

Australia’s coastal and island geography becomes the setting for an increasingly private form of travel. A helicopter takes Liz across the sparkling waters, reefs, and islands of the Whitsunday Passage to the marina. The movement is luxurious and carefully managed: the passengers walk through a harbour lined with shops, galleries, and cafes, while their luggage is mysteriously dealt with. Cameron’s practical insistence that Liz obtain a hat before going out on the water turns the landscape into an experience that must be prepared for and consumed under his guidance.

The journey continues to Whitehaven Beach, where they anchor in time to watch the sun set. Once the anchor is secure and the motors and other systems are switched off, Cameron takes Liz into his arms on the lower deck. The Australian seascape becomes a relational space: the open water, reef, islands, and beach are not neutral scenery but the setting in which professional distance gives way to physical and emotional intimacy.

Australian cultural references also enter the family’s everyday life. When Archie receives a didgeridoo taller than himself, he is troubled because he cannot play it and has been told that girls are not allowed to do so. Liz responds by explaining that the instrument requires special breathing and greater age, then offers to help him learn how it is made and where it may have come from. The scene presents Indigenous Australian material culture through a child’s curiosity and a caregiving conversation, while the evidence remains focused on the instrument’s place in Archie’s imaginative education rather than developing a broader account of its cultural meaning.

A different cultural connection appears at Taronga Zoo, where a real baby elephant’s birth becomes the basis for a favourite game. Liz finds a recording of Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” from Hatari, and she, Daisy Kerr, Scout, and Archie imitate elephants in the playroom. This Australian zoo setting links digital viewing, international popular culture, and domestic play, showing how the novel’s family world absorbs the country’s institutions and landscapes into shared rituals.

Narrative and Symbolic Function

Australia’s spatial range structures the novel’s movement from exposure to belonging. Liz’s attempt to leave Narelle Hastings’ Sydney mansion leads through the kitchen into a service courtyard and toward a high wall; when the back door is locked, she pushes a wheelie bin against the wall, throws her shoes over it, climbs up, and drops awkwardly to the other side, tearing her tights and grazing her knee. The escape is comic and physical, but it also establishes the importance of boundaries—between guest and servant spaces, privilege and vulnerability, and the public party and the private encounter that follows.

Later, Yewarra reverses that movement. Liz initially feels that she might escape Cameron’s car, estate, and control, as though she were entering a zone where she had no control. Yet the garden enchants her almost immediately. Australia’s estates and landscapes thus operate ambivalently: they can be intimidating territories belonging to other people, but they can also become spaces of welcome, memory, and possible domestic attachment.

The final island setting transforms this pattern into celebration. As the sun sinks, Cameron and Liz are pronounced man and wife, looking only at each other while the sky turns liquid gold and the water takes on the same radiance. Afterward, guests return to Leilani, while Archie and Scout remain with the newly married couple as they cruise the Whitsundays for several weeks. Australia’s geography has carried the characters from the social pressure of Sydney through secluded estates and open water to a marriage witnessed against the sea, making place an active instrument in the story’s progression from guarded separation to shared family life.