Australia originally appeared to me in the form of a boyfriend. A fellow student brought him home one evening without explanation except that he was a mechanic and it was love. Unspoken was the Australian part. An affront to our all-ladies rental, he was everything Nevil Shute had captured about being Australian – at 6ft 6”, barely contained by our small British house he was at best unwieldy, at worst intimidating, oscillating between grunts of an indeterminate nature or interminable silence, punctuated by an occasional hiss as he opened a can of Foster’s.