In the early 1950s, the writer Hal Porter, then in his early forties, lived for a couple of years in the Tasmanian village of Fern Tree, halfway up kunanyi (then known as Mount Wellington). The scattered settlement was home, he would later write, to ‘a community of city-eschewers and suburb-disdainers’, ‘escapees from what they call The Rat Race’. These proto-hippies favoured ‘cabin-like weatherboard houses of singular unsightliness set, with a view to views, in what much resemble the crude clearings of early settlers’. Undeterred by ‘built-in snowstorms, visiting bushfires, and resident soggy clouds’, Fern Tree’s residents showed a decided partiality for ‘flagons of claret, political leftism, bellicose pacifism, the taking up of crazes and causes: palmistry, immorality, astrology, starving children (far-off and coloured), air-conditioned cells and caviar for criminals, preservation of murderers, carte blanche for abortionists’.

Hal Porter first encountered Fern Tree when he moved to Hobart in 1946 to take a job as resident English master at Hutchins boys’ school (short-lived, as it turned out: he was dismissed after two terms). He soon found himself socialising with a ‘social-intellectual clique’ in Hobart society that he would come to view with revulsion. His new friends, he would write some 20 years later, were ‘highly educated, nearly charming, far too articulate Monsters of Depravity’, married couples ‘whose lives follow a pattern of sordid and uninhibited relationships plotted, apparently, by Iris Murdoch’. These monsters took ‘patent pride’ in being ‘emancipated, special, free from bourgeois repressions’, yet it was easy to see that they were headed towards ‘shameful conclusions’. He sought relief in the wholesome company of returned servicemen, salt-of-the-earth types who congregated ‘in the Back Bar of Hadley’s Hotel’ and dedicated themselves to the consumption of honest, straightforward English drinks such as beer and whisky (not a fancy foreign flagon of claret to be seen).