The Clare Valley

It is a century and a half since The Spectator noted the exceptional qualities of South Australia, a colony of free settlers untainted — unlike the rest of the continent — by the convict stain. ‘Everywhere … the enclosures over miles of plain, the hedged gardens, the well-grown orchards and well-appointed homesteads, proclaim the possession of the land by an industrious and thrifty yeomanry,’ wrote a Mr Wilson in these pages in 1866. ‘It is England in miniature, England without its poverty … with a finer climate, a virgin soil … more liberal institutions and a happier people.’

These days, alas, the ‘thrifty yeomanry’ has to support a ballooning public sector, and the state, once a manufacturing powerhouse, wrestles with Tasmania to stay out of last place in the league table of Australian prosperity. Yet this misfortune has an upside. There has been no money to demolish anything in South Australia — it’s like an antipod-ean Havana.