A DOG runs up to my husband on a windswept beach on Sunday morning. Tess is a Jack Russell cross, caramel and white and a question mark white fluffy tail, an RSPCA-rescued dog, now eager to please. ‘Not a bad place to live, this,’ the tall man with a blue beanie opens the conversation as he gestures to the wide bay at the mouth of the Inglis River, protected by the imposing Table Cape. ‘It’s better than being at Bondi. Just imagine, the beach’d be full of people.’

I laughed. Just seconds before, my husband had said, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be in Shanghai, pushing your way down Shanxi Nan Lu?’ We tease ourselves with imagining ourselves elsewhere, happy to be home, here. Home. After thirty years of gypsy wanderings. Home is this place that Phillip Adams described as ‘agonisingly beautiful’ in the introduction to his James Martineau Memorial Lecture ‘An atheist defends religion’ at the Cradle Coast campus of the University of Tasmania in 2010.