For someone who grew up in roughly the same period, and only a few miles south of Conrad’s suburban home, Down Home is richly evocative. Some of our memories are shared; the royal visit of 1954, the diorama of ‘the last Tasmanian Aborigines’ in the Hobart Museum, the ritual explanation for women seeking abortions who were said to have ‘gone to Melbourne’ (as in fact they had).

Other memories are of course different. Down Home is so skilfully written that it takes time to realise that it obscures as much as it reveals, above all that in re-seeking childhood memories it tells us remarkably little about Peter Conrad. (At the end of the book he describes himself as ‘maladjusted’, but what does he mean by this?) The most revealing memory (to which he refers several times) is of having burst into tears at a gymkhana at the age of four or five. In retrospect, the tears are attributed to existentialist angst:

The mountains told me that I was in Tasmania, which only made things worse. This was not the life I wanted; somehow I’d been given the wrong one. My tears raged at the injustice – or incompetence – of it.

It is hard to believe that a four (even a five) year old could have been terrified by ‘the rawness, the shivering vulnerability of the place’. One suspects a far more prosaic explanation, but the tantrum becomes a metaphor for Conrad’s major perception of Tasmania, as a place unsuited for human (at least white) civilization. When, later on, he refers to ‘the quixotic madness of settlement’, he is restating the sentiments he claims to have already experienced as a child.

This is important, because Down Home is essentially a romantic version of Tasmania, one which insists on seeing it as wild, Gothic and (literally) at the end of the world. (Only true if you see northern Europe as the beginning.) Ironically, he devotes some space, towards the end of the book, to analysing the way in which Australian art and literature has sought to describe Australia from an Anglocentric view. Ironic, because Down Home is itself an example of such Anglocentrism.

Thus in a reference to the period after the Tasman Bridge collapsed, and Hobart was cut off from the Eastern suburbs (and airport), Peter writes: ‘For two and a half years before the span was rebuilt, Hobart was reminded every day of its bereft insularity.’ The reality is that any city dependent on a major crossing, wherever it was situated, would have experienced civic traumas after such an accident. But this is too prosaic a reality for Conrad, who describes ‘the desolation I had always felt . . . The ragged bush beyond the buildings, the wet throttling jungles which men had to hack their way through’.

For Conrad the grim hopelessness of Van Diemen’s Land, as portrayed for example in Marcus Clarke’s For The Term Of His Natural Life, remains the truth about Tasmania. He writes: ‘The human race runs out just before the land ejects a trail of full stops into the ocean; it is a world which never needed us, where we never belonged – and that is its beauty.’

This may well seem an unexceptional view from London or New York (in whose art rooms Peter Conrad found the illustrations which best suit his view of Tasmania). From the vantage point of much of Australia, however, Tasmania is neither particularly barren nor inhospitable. What Down Home does not deal with is the everyday reality of contemporary Tasmania, which is far more like the rest of Australia in its social life than you would guess from Conrad’s often heated prose. (Townsville or Wagga may look somewhat different and have different climates, but life there is very similar to life in Launceston.)

The expatriate view is always skewed by the need for self-justification; Peter Conrad, like Germaine Greer or Clive James, clearly feels the need to explain to himself (we are less interested) why he does not live in Australia. At least he spares us the maudlin claim that he still calls Tasmania home, although at the very end of the book, during a short interlude in Melbourne and Sydney, he says of the Opera House that it showed him Australia’had become the place I went overseas to find: a society where you could perpetuate childhood in the earnest playfulness of art’.

For most of the book his references are to England and America, ‘Australia’s twin and schizoid self-images’.

I think Conrad makes too much of what has become a rather hackneyed analysis of Australian identity. In particular, it leads him to neglect the extent to which Tasmanians measure themselves against the rest of Australia (belatedly recognised in a final chapter called ‘The Main Land’). In my experience, Tasmanians identify themselves overwhelmingly in relation to Melbourne and Canberra, from the days when the Melbourne Herald was sold on the streets of Hobart every afternoon to the present successful campaigns of Premier Gray against Canberra ‘interference’.

Expatriates are very special sorts of visitors, claiming both special knowledge and the perspective of outsiders. Both of these factors are present in Peter Conrad’s book, but so too is a sort of wilful ignorance of what present-day Tasmania is all about. He talks at length of the Aboriginal inheritance but not of the rise of a Tasmanian Aboriginal movement, of the hostility of West Coast locals to ‘Greenies’, but not of the importance of the environmental movement or of the prospect that they could hold the balance of power after the next state election.

But if Peter Conrad’s Tasmania is a compound of nostalgia and romanticism, his book is nonetheless a triumphant piece of writing, a remarkable invocation of one person’s own mythology about his birthplace.