Many years later, when I went to Oxford, I studied history, an idea of time formed over 3000 years of human experience in Europe, which, I discovered, made perfect sense of European time, stopping at all stations of European progress and European thought. It was a straight railway line that perfectly mirrored an experience that became an idea, and an idea that became experience, and an experience that became European thought and then the European novel. But it made no sense of Tasmania.
