Melbourne is a recurring setting where Dorrigo Evans’s ambitions, intimate relationships, and memories of loss converge. He arrives there on a scholarship to study medicine, separated from his family and from the place where his mother is dying; later, the city is the setting of his surgical training and his relationship with Ella. During the war, brief leave brings him back to Melbourne and to the social world he imagines sharing with her. It is also where Amy Mulvaney has an abortion arranged by Keith Mulvaney, a concealed event that continues to shape her recollections. Across these episodes, Melbourne is less a background than a meeting point between the life Dorrigo tries to build and the experiences he cannot leave behind.

Education and Distance from Home

Dorrigo comes to Melbourne on a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Melbourne. His mother dies of tuberculosis when he is nineteen, while he is away on the mainland. He is not present, and the distance is more than geographical: his family is in Tasmania, while his studies draw him into a world that seems socially and culturally remote from theirs.

At Ormond College, Dorrigo encounters people from wealthy and influential families whose histories and achievements they recount with certainty. Their inherited status, homes, businesses, and marriages offer a striking contrast with his own family, whose main achievement he understands only much later to have been survival. At the time, he sees that history of endurance as failure when set beside wealth, recognition, and family prestige. He stays away from his family until his mother’s death, and at her funeral he does not cry. Melbourne thus marks both educational advancement and an estrangement whose cost he will only gradually recognize.

The city’s significance in this period lies partly in what it offers Dorrigo: a professional future and entry into a more privileged social world. It also exposes him to assumptions about class and human worth that he eventually recognizes as narrow and false. His movement into that world does not simply erase his background. Rather, it helps create a divide between the family he loves and the social standing he learns to pursue.

Surgical Training and Ella’s World

Dorrigo meets Ella in Melbourne while completing his surgical training. She is a teacher, the daughter of a prominent Melbourne solicitor, and the granddaughter of one of the authors of the federal constitution. Her family’s position offers Dorrigo an image of security and continuity, a world he finds attractive even when he recognizes that Ella’s conversation can seem conventional and rehearsed. He regards her as kind and devoted, and assumes that he will marry her, though they have not discussed it directly.

For Dorrigo, marriage to Ella appears to belong to the same forward movement as completing his medical degree and receiving his commission: one more step into a life of progress and achievement. Her family welcomes him as a young man with promise, but the welcome carries the expectation that he will enter their world on its terms. Their social circle helps him imagine himself as someone destined to rise after the war.

That vision becomes especially powerful during a forty-eight-hour wartime leave. Dorrigo takes a military flight to Melbourne and spends two days and a night with Ella. At first, he tries to fill the time with activity and closeness, while feeling that he must tell her about the woman he encountered in an Adelaide bookshop. He cannot explain what happened, and tells himself there is nothing to disclose. He and Ella dance and drink; he holds to the familiar relationship as a source of reassurance, despite doubts he cannot easily name.

As the leave continues, parties and meetings with Ella’s friends and her parents’ friends draw Dorrigo into Melbourne society. He begins to see himself as they see him: a young man who will achieve great things after the war. The doubts that had unsettled him recede, and his relationship with Ella again seems easy and settled. When he returns to Adelaide and military preparations, he has forgotten both the bookshop encounter and the questions it raised. Melbourne’s social world therefore offers him not only a prospective home but also a temporary means of quieting uncertainty.

Amy’s Disclosure and the Hidden Visit

Melbourne has a more private and painful meaning in Amy’s account of the period before her marriage. She tells Dorrigo that she went there to see a doctor whom Keith had arranged to consult. It was November, and the doctor performed an abortion. Amy explains that she had told people she was going to Melbourne to see the Cup, and that she prepared herself to speak about racing and betting so the stated reason for the trip would seem credible.

Her account makes clear that the horse race was a cover, not the purpose of the journey. Amy says she had little interest in horses and chose Old Rowley because the horse was a long shot and she expected it to lose. After the visit, she says, the subject ceased to matter to her. Her occasional betting becomes connected to the story she had adopted and maintained, rather than to a lasting enthusiasm for racing.

Amy also recalls that Keith was kind to her when she returned. She wonders whether guilt or shame shaped his response, and suggests that his wish to marry her may have been an attempt to make amends, though she cannot be certain of his reasons. The sequence ties Melbourne to an event kept from public view and to a marriage whose beginning Amy remembers as bound up with distress, uncertainty, and Keith’s conduct. Her later account turns the city into the setting of a secret she had once covered with a plausible public story.

A Postwar Destination and a Wartime Memory

In a later episode, Dorrigo is on an afternoon flight to Melbourne when he sees a snow-covered mountain through the plane window. The sight leads his thoughts onward, and he reaches into the air as though he might still find the femoral artery he had failed to locate in time. The scene does not place that wartime operation in Melbourne; rather, the city-bound flight gives the remembered medical failure a setting in the postwar present.

The association connects Dorrigo’s professional identity with the limits of what he could do under the conditions of captivity. He had to make urgent decisions amid illness, scarce supplies, and demands for labor, and he could not save everyone. On the flight, the past returns not as an abstract recollection but as a physical gesture: his hand searches for what he once needed to find. Melbourne becomes the destination against which that memory surfaces, linking his civilian life and medical work to a wartime loss he has not put behind him.

Together, the city’s episodes chart different kinds of movement: a young man leaving home for education, a surgeon imagining marriage and social advancement, a woman traveling under a cover story, and an older Dorrigo carrying an unfinished memory into the postwar years. Melbourne repeatedly offers the promise of a new life, but the events associated with it also reveal what that promise cannot settle: family estrangement, concealed pain, and the persistence of wartime responsibility.