In 2021, Hamish McDonald visited Burketown in the Gulf of Carpentaria to look at 'the unlikely place' where Nevil Shute's 'infatuation' with remote Australia began. McDonald examines the changes in Burketown since Shute's writing of A Town Like Alice, especially the lives of the local Aboriginal population.
McDonald also comments on Shute's 'hatred' of the welfare state and illustrates the ways in which this disdain seeps through into Shute's fiction writing.
