A history student sitting next to me put up his hand at question time and asked Reynolds about those people in the first half of the nineteenth century who argued against terra nullius. Like everyone, the student said, this group must have had an agenda. Reynolds stuck to his thesis that the protesters belonged to the many utopian and dissenting immigrant groups who came to South Australia; that theirs was a moral protest. When I asked the student what he meant by ‘agenda’, he told me, with an intensity bordering on paranoia, that the protesters were probably the hoi polloi having a go at the powers that be. Reynolds, he said, was a particular historian with one point of view; he was another. Everyone came to history with an agenda.

Reading Adelaide prompted all manner of agenda-spotting. What did the publisher expect from each writer in regard to his or her particular capital city? What did the writers want to convey about the cities and their relationships to them? Where does each city begin and end? And what personal biases accompanied me to Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Adelaide?

Having moved to McLaren Vale from Sydney ten years ago, in search of a little dignity and low rent, I now admit to a certain eyes-wide-open disappointment in Adelaide, and thus to a self-serving expectation that Goldsworthy might add at least a little grit to help justify the irritation. For instance, one of the first things I noticed was that the names of so many roads are the still current names of prominent families, both in this area and in town. There is a sense here of unremitting, longitudinal land privilege, which is more village-like than city-vital. Towards the close of Adelaide, Goldsworthy, in a rare show of gentle criticism, writes, ‘Some Adelaideans … retain the niggling sense that they truly belong somewhere better, somewhere bigger or classier, with more theatres in it, more celebrities, better newspapers, more people to have sex with, funnier comedians, more shops open later at night’.

Perhaps the outsider resident has a different point of view from the person born here who leaves and then returns, as Goldsworthy did: ‘what knows she of Adelaide who only Adelaide knows?’ The overriding tone of this beautifully written book is that of affection, and the overall architecture, if this is not too grand a word, Goldsworthy uses to organise her portrait, personal as well as historical and living, is to take nine very small to medium-sized iconic objects as the starting point for each chapter and to weave from them a larger picture. The image of Penelope ‘patiently unravelling her tapestry at night as she fends off the suitors and waits for Ulysses to come home’ is Goldsworthy’s, and it’s a lovely idea. So there is the map, the painting, the statue, the rotunda, the bucket of peaches, the photograph, the pink shorts, the frog cake, and the concert ticket.

The painting in question – ‘The Proclamation of South Australia’ (1856–76), by Charles Hill (it is owned by the Art Gallery of South Australia) – provides the reader with a chapter to marvel at, a lapidary synthesis of historical fact, interpretation, explanation, and wonderfully evocative description of the details of the painting. ‘History and cultural memory are not necessarily the same thing,’ Goldsworthy writes, and further on, ‘[The painting] gives us a point of connection between the present, in all its unremarkable familiarity, and the past in all its unrecoverable strangeness.’

Indeed, these first four chapters have the air of history sweetly and seductively taught and woven into the present. The history of the rotunda, built in Glasgow and shipped to Adelaide in 1881, segues into the place of the Torrens ‘Lake’ and Elder Park in the life of Adelaide and the idea of the pursuit of pleasure, seemingly at odds with ‘Dissenter-dominated Sabbatarianism’ and ‘nobly depressing rectitude’ (this last attributed to the historian Douglas Pike). Not mentioned by Goldsworthy, but remembered by many, is Robyn Archer’s inspired use of the rotunda as the site for multicultural weddings during the 1998 Festival of the Arts.

In the chapter taking its thread from a bucket of peaches, much is made, as it should be, of Adelaide as a city of productive gardens and lemon trees, and much more of Adelaide’s heat; a heat that produces a ‘thirsty, antiseptic dryness’. Much is also made of the erroneous comparison of Adelaide to a version of a Mediterranean climatic idyll, rather than to its true latitudinal brothers such as Tangier. Like many people who returned over and over again to the biennial Adelaide Festival (soon to be annual), I revelled in the lack of humidity and will forever, happily, connect the festival with unrelentingly, shimmeringly, hot, dry days. Now that I live and garden south of Adelaide, I prepare for the summer as though for a siege, and battle through the first months of the year.

The Adelaide-based writer Peter Goldsworthy (not related to Kerryn) calls McLaren Vale ‘the south wing of paradise’. Is McLaren Vale a part of Adelaide? And if it is, why not also write about the north and the purgatorial slippage of the utopian satellite town of Elizabeth? Both Goldsworthys agree about McLaren Vale, but this resident does not. The triumvirate of grape, olive, and almond here is dominated by the grape, and the vistas are relentlessly mono-agricultural. With the glut of wine came recent land sales and the quick profit of housing estates, which, if the local council had had more environmental and aesthetic gumption, would not be the abject scars they are. This land should surely be used to grow food rather than for wine or quarter-acre-block housing.

Goldsworthy admits in the book to having to battle colleagues and friends over her emphasis on the pink shorts, and, fine writer that she is, she defends herself well. The pink shorts were, of course, those worn to parliament by Premier Don Dunstan in November 1972. The conundrum that is Dunstan is also that of Adelaide: entrenched, privileged conservatism that sometimes welcomes inspired liberalism. Dunstan implemented constitutional reform, workplace reforms, instigated changes in laws relating to the consumption of alcohol (thus improving the quality of life he so cared about). Homosexuality was decriminalised; rape within marriage was made a crime. He set up the first-ever legislation about Aboriginal land rights. He did so much more. But he wore pink shorts to parliament (making a very sensible, sartorial point about climate), and the pink shorts are what everyone seems to remember.

I wonder if Goldsworthy, in using her chosen icons, has inadvertently defined Adelaide as the sum of small things. Or is she, perhaps, being politely, affectionately subversive? To be able to encapsulate a city through a finite litany of names, companies, and iconic objects is, in part, to emasculate that city and reveal its niggling inferiority complex. That said, in her lovely closing paragraphs, Goldsworthy champions the sense of a space filled by the ‘living body’, giving back to the city its sovereign, living legitimacy.

Whatever her motives, Kerryn Goldsworthy has achieved something somehow larger than the small capital city that she set out to explain.