‘The only place I feel safe is still so out of reach’

For Annabel Fenwick Elliott, the quiet, breezy Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia has a special significance

There are lots of things wrong with Australia, without even delving into its questionable Covid policies. It is too far, for one – not just from the UK, but from everywhere. There are more beasts here that can kill you than anywhere else in the world; from tiny venomous spiders and vicious snakes to crocodiles and great white sharks. And it’s very bureaucratic. If you can tolerate all that, it’s also arguably the best country in the world.

The state of South Australia has been my hiding place ever since my father moved there with my stepmother and half-siblings when I was 16. It’s where I retreat to every time I have a meltdown or a burnout – about once a year, on average – and I have thus grown to know this particular enclave very well. It feels like the only place I’m safe when things go wrong. And it is where, at the age of 30, I finally got to know my father; a story which I’ll get to later.

The Fleurieu Peninsula is strangely unlauded for how disproportionately beautiful it is. Quiet and uncluttered, sun-drenched and breezy, bountiful in good food and wine; I am glad, really, that so few people know about it. Were it an outlier to Sydney or Melbourne, this stretch of coast would be inundated, but thankfully its nearest city is Adelaide, about an hour’s drive away – not a metropolis to write home about; dull, characterless and with no impressive landmarks.

My father moved out of Adelaide’s suburbs – never a set-up that suited him, not that he complained at the time – six years ago following his divorce, to live alone for the first time in his life (but for his English setter, Mrs Perdita Shrimpton) on a four-acre patch of land on the rural peninsula, halfway down a long, dusty dead-end road that leads to a beach hardly anyone goes to.

The Fleurieu’s defining feature is its dramatic hilly landscape; rotund and far-reaching, rich emerald-coloured in the winter, burnt yellow during summer, prone to extraordinary sunsets, strewn with cows, kangaroos and the odd parched tree, all of which appear to tumble abruptly on to the coast when you reach the southernmost slopes.

When he first arrived, the property was an ugly, boxy bungalow with lino tiles, grim blinds and peach-coloured walls. He wasn’t, understandably, in the best of moods post-divorce, and for a while most of the cardboard boxes sat unopened. But slowly he set about transforming the bones of this house into an almost-eccentrically English home that he dubbed “the Phenelry”, a near-clone to the one we grew up in back in London three decades ago – and a project that persists to this day.

There’s a cedar pergola from which a Union Jack flutters proudly in the ocean breeze, an ancient Weber barbecue and a croquet lawn that should be green but, for all my father’s perseverance, refuses to grow properly under the fierce Australian sun. Inside, the furniture is Edwardian, the carpet is seagrass, there’s an old grandfather clock, a wood fire and a library groaning floorto-ceiling with books. Indeed, stepping inside, you would think you were in an English town house, were it not for the snakes in the garden, and Bruce, the lawn-destroying kangaroo at which my father fires foam-tipped arrows from his bow to shoo it away.

It was here, five years ago as a newly freelance writer, that I found myself alone with my father for the first time in my life. My two half-siblings were at school in Adelaide and living with their mother an hour away, and my other brother was in New York. Finding myself approaching 30, single, with no office job to get back to, I extended my Christmas visit that year and hung around.

Its defining feature is its dramatic hilly landscape; rotund and far-reaching

At first I wondered if we’d have much to talk about, but it soon transpired we had plenty in common. I already knew we both liked Marmite, animals, obscure historical facts and popular science; and disliked religion, humidity and overhead lighting. But we’d never before had so much time without the rest of the clan to discuss it all at length.

He set up a makeshift office in which I could write, cooked inventive meals and tried to get me interested in my ancestry. I unpacked the rest of his boxes, alphabetised his kitchen spices, rearranged the cupboards so that the unhealthiest snacks were the most bothersome to reach, and persuaded him to get a cat: Antigone Victoria Powderpaws.

We spent several months largely ignoring emails from the outside world, tearing through the hills on his motorbike and draining his whisky reserves. I’ll never forget these times. After a succession of ups and downs in the lead-up, it felt like it does when you get home from a long, tiring, uneasy journey and put your feet up on the sofa. Eventually, it was time to return to reality: he as a part-time barrister, me as a writer.

Three years ago, by this time gainfully employed at this paper, I was struck down with a hideous case of the Black Dog, as I like to call my occasional depressive episodes (a term borrowed from Winston Churchill). There’s nothing much I can do when this happens; my brain turns to soup, I can’t read let alone write, and I cry often for absolutely no reason. The Phenelry was the obvious place in which to hibernate until I got better, and how grateful I was to have it, and my father, who regularly sat with me wordlessly on the bench overlooking the sea while pointless tears rolled down my cheeks.

I’ve since been back, compos mentis, with my journalist hat on to write a travel feature on these surrounds; whereby for once I was able to treat my father at the region’s fantastic restaurants and cellar doors. Should you ever happen to find yourself in the Fleurieu region, don’t miss the bombastic d’Arenberg Cube: a giant mirrored

Rubik’s cube plonked amid an expanse of vineyards with an “alternate reality museum” and a nine-course degustation menu that will both confuse and amaze you. Or, indeed, the Salopian Inn, which many locals will tell you is the best restaurant around, with the greatest gyoza you’ll taste anywhere.

Had I known back in early 2020 that Boris Johnson’s three-week circuit breaker would have had me working remotely for more than a year, I might have raced to these hills before the Australian borders closed to base myself inside their Fort Knox, not Britain’s. Practicalities aside (my dog, the time difference, my employment contract) I can’t think of a better place to ride out a pandemic; in fact I’ve always said it would make the perfect base for an apocalypse.

But alas, with little hope of Australia reopening its gates before 2022 (confoundingly, there are no plans to do this even after its entire population is vacci

nated, according to prime minister Scott Morrison), then by the time it eventually does, it will have been several years since I last saw my father and half-siblings.

As soon as that day comes, I will be turning up at Adelaide Airport with a bottle of duty-free Talisker Single Malt for us to drink in the pergola as the sun paints outrageous hues across the blackening sky, happy to be home at last.

For more information on South Australia, see southaustralia.com. Overseas holidays are currently subject to restrictions. See Page 3.

A breath of fresh air: the view from Commodore Reserve Lookout, near Port Elliot on the Fleurieu Peninsula where Annabel worked from a makeshift office in her father’s house

iAnnabel with her siblings, her father and his dog – Mrs Perdita Shrimpton – at the beach