Adelaide is the place where Dorrigo Evans first encountered Amy Mulvaney, and the city later became one he would not visit again. Though its streets and landmarks receive little description, Adelaide gathers an intimate beginning, a long refusal, and a devastating piece of wartime news into a single point on the map. Its significance lies in how a chance meeting there continues to shape Dorrigo’s choices even as his conscious memory of Amy fades.

First Meeting and the Red Camellia

Dorrigo later remembered his first meeting with Amy as ordinary rather than portentous. He noticed the beauty spot above her lip, partly obscured by dust motes in shafts of dusty light, and recalled their conversation as mildly amusing. When he returned the following day to buy Catullus, it was the book, not Amy, that remained most clearly in his mind. The encounter seemed to him the sort of curious meeting he would soon forget. Only in retrospect did Adelaide become the beginning of a connection he could not explain as simply as love.

The image associated with that meeting was the red camellia. Years later, after Dorrigo and Ella moved into a new house in Toorak, he took an unusual interest in the garden only to have a large, beautiful red camellia removed, to Ella’s fury. He otherwise left gardening to her and the gardener. The novel links this act to Amy’s absence without presenting it as a deliberate tribute: Dorrigo did not understand his action that way, and would have been horrified if anyone had said so. The flower makes Adelaide’s memory material in a later domestic setting, where an unexplained gesture carries the force of something unacknowledged.

A City He Avoids

In the years after the war, Dorrigo flatly refused to visit Adelaide, even when major professional or veterans’ events were held there. The refusal persisted while his public standing grew and his work took him into departments, reviews, and national health enquiries. Adelaide therefore remains more than a remembered location: it is a place excluded from his movements, despite the practical and professional reasons that might have taken him there.

That absence contrasts with the gradual weakening of his conscious memories. In his early years with Ella, he thought frequently about Amy and wondered what their connection had been. Over time, as Ella became his trusted adviser and companion, whole weeks and then months could pass without his thinking of Amy. The refusal to return to Adelaide nevertheless sits beside this gradual forgetting. The city remains bound to an encounter whose details are becoming indistinct, suggesting that a place can retain significance for Dorrigo even when he no longer regularly summons the person associated with it.

The Hotel Tragedy and the Letter

Adelaide returns to the story through a newspaper cutting enclosed in a letter Ella sends to Dorrigo during the war. The letter is already six months old when he reads it in camp. Its report describes a gas explosion in the kitchen of the King of Cornwall Hotel, followed by a fire that destroys the building. Four people are reported dead, including the much-respected publican Keith Mulvaney; three others, among them Mrs Mulvaney, are initially unaccounted for and believed to have perished.

Dorrigo reads the cutting repeatedly. Ella’s letter also tells him that enquiries through the coroner’s office have confirmed Mrs Keith Mulvaney’s death, information kept out of the paper after the tragedy. The name initially seems disconnected from the news. Then Dorrigo recognizes that Amy, the woman he knew in Adelaide, was Mrs Keith Mulvaney. Ella’s letter thus turns Adelaide from the site of a meeting into the point of origin for a loss Dorrigo had not known had occurred. It also discloses that Ella has concealed the truth from him: Amy had only ever been Amy to Dorrigo, and he had no idea that the name in the report was hers.

Memory’s Afterlife

The city’s importance reaches beyond the scenes explicitly set there. Dorrigo’s absence from Adelaide, his removal of the camellia, and the eventual news of Amy’s death give the first meeting consequences that neither of them could have seen in its apparently unremarkable beginning. The narrative makes that beginning deliberately modest: the book catches Dorrigo’s attention more firmly than the woman, and the encounter seems destined to vanish. What endures is less a stable recollection of Adelaide than the persistent influence of what happened there.

Years later, while preparing for an emergency appendectomy, Dorrigo encounters a young patient named Amy Gascoigne. As he scrubs up, he murmurs the words Amie, amante, amour. The head nurse asks what poem the recitation comes from; walking into the theatre, Dorrigo realizes that this is the first time in several years he has consciously thought of Amy. The moment is not set in Adelaide, but it renews the association the city holds: a name can return without warning, carrying a history that deliberate forgetting and physical avoidance have not erased. Adelaide consequently functions as the novel’s quiet geography of attachment, not because Dorrigo keeps revisiting it, but because his life continues to bear the marks of the encounter he left there.