I would agree, though I would bet not fifty freepers even saw the mini-series when it aired. Made me want to visit Alice Springs! Shute had to have based that novel on folks from that town so the population has to be my kind of people.
Jean Paget was based on Carry Geysel (Mrs J. G. Geysel-Vonck) whom Shute met while visiting Sumatra in 1949.[1][2] Geysel had been one of a group of about 80 Dutch civilians taken prisoner by Japanese forces at Padang, in the Dutch East Indies in 1942. Shute's understanding was that the women were forced to march around Sumatra for two-and-a-half years, covering 1,900 kilometres (1,200 mi), with fewer than 30 people surviving the march. However, the Nevil Shute foundation insists that this was a misunderstanding, and that the women were merely transported from prison camp to prison camp by the Japanese. "Shute, fortunately misinformed about parts of her experience, mistakenly understands that the women were made to walk. This was possibly the luckiest misunderstanding of his life..." says the Foundation.[3]
Shute based the character of Harman on Herbert James "Ringer" Edwards, an Australian veteran of the Malayan campaign, whom Shute met in 1948 at a station (ranch) in Queensland.[4][5] Edwards had been crucified for 63 hours by Japanese soldiers on the Burma Railway. He had later escaped execution a second time, when his "last meal" of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Crucifixion (or Haritsuke) was a form of punishment or torture that the Japanese sometimes used against prisoners during the war.
The fictional "Willstown" is reportedly based on Burketown and Normanton in Queensland, which Shute also visited in 1948.[6] (Burke and Wills were well-known explorers of Australia.)
In a note to the text, Shute makes it known to the reader that a forced march of women by the Japanese did indeed take place during World War II, but the women in question were Dutch, not British, and the march was in Sumatra, not Malaya.
...so the population has to be my kind of people.
I really do love the people in this book! Noel Strachan is a true hero, also.
The book reviewer of the Guardian had this to say about the novel.
“Probably more people have shed tears over the last page of A Town Like Alice than about any other novel in the English language.”
They are very sweet tears, though. It is a wonderful story about three very good people, folks you feel like you know, and wish that you had actually spent time with them in person.
Here is the last page (the movie is exactly the same)
“I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.”