A weekend at Cradle Mountain was a long overdue escape from the hustle and bustle of Hobart. I really wanted to go in winter to see snow and clouds and mysterious rain, and I’m really glad I did. Nothing especially exciting happened but it was absolutely spectacular and beautiful. I walked around Dove Lake in the rain, through Ballroom Forest and the occasional bit of rainforest, and then across some bush. Most exciting were all the wombats, and the pademelon joey – so unbelievably cute. I also saw some traces of Tasmanian devils: they push their prey into the ground while eating it, so bits of the animal get crushed into the mud.

On Sunday morning I got up at 6am to see the moon and stars and a dusting of snow, and set off to catch the sunrise at a rainforest waterfall. I got about 10 seconds of sun before a snowstorm set in. Overnight the park had turned into a picturesque winter wonderland, with lichen-covered trees frosted thickly with snow.

Up towards the summit of Cradle Mountain it got snowier and snowier until everything was black and white. I was falling up to my thighs in snow, occasionally crawling on all fours – the serious people had snow shoes and crampons – before finally turning back and retreating to the emergency hut. The cloud blocked out everything below, cutting us off from the world like a dream. I was blinded by the snow and had started seeing stars, and the huge footprint holes glowed with a pale, alien turquoise light. Occasionally the cloud would lift enough to reveal the jagged peaks of Cradle Mountain, when everyone stopped and gazed in awe. And then it disappeared and we returned to the pure and magical land of black and white.

I reached Tasmania a while ago. I’m living in one of the southernmost cities in the world, and it feels southern, full of Antarctic wind and snow: we’re in the roaring 40s here – the wind that created a naval superhighway and blew ships around the world. The wind is vicious, and it tends to snow rather than rain, but the sky is nearly always blue, and there always seems to be a rainbow somewhere if you look hard enough.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Hobart for fear of making premature and prejudiced judgements that I’ll have to live with for the next six months. But it’s high time I wrote something.

We’re living in Battery Point, the quaint village-like part of Hobart just by Salamanca waterfront. The house is white and sharp-lined, part of a brown and grey modern development. It’s got a whole wall of French windows which is wonderful when it’s sunny, but there’s only one fan heater which is supposed to heat the whole house; for the first few days we froze, until we cracked and bought some electric heaters. I bought a second-hand road bike (“a piece of junk” said the man in the bike shop) and have become addicted to my morning cycle ride along the River Derwent.

Everything looks a bit cold, but perhaps that’s because it’s winter and I’ve long forgotten what summer is like. The buildings are elegant though rather cool and severe. It’s hard to believe this is a capital city; there are no skyscrapers, no fancy hotels, no large official buildings, no wailing sirens. In fact, it has the air of a rather pleasant little hilly town. There are good museums and exhibitions and plays, but it’s all so small! One day while standing at some traffic lights (they do exist) a car sped through an amber light, and it occurred to me this was the most exciting thing I’d seen.

In the water stand two enormous ice-breakers: Aurora Australis and L’Astrolabe. Next to them in Salamanca Place, the trees glow with lights every evening. It feels like the depot at the end of the world, hidden and forgotten about. Maps sometimes forget to put Tasmania on the map of Australia, or even leave it off deliberately.

And what of the work, the reason I’m here? Consider the size of Hobart and the amount of politics in inverse proportion. And I can’t explain how strange it is to find myself studying Romanian art and history here. But where better to dedicate myself to the pursuit of truth and wisdom than a place of no distractions, of pure wind and blue skies, of prisons and wilderness?

During my time in Adelaide I managed to squeeze in a trip to the Flinders Ranges, the ancient mountain range in South Australia. I was stumped by a lack of car and driving license so was looking for towns that were relatively accessible. On Alan’s recommendation (and nowhere else, he insisted, really captured the heart of the Flinders) I decided to head up to Arkaroola, a wilderness sanctuary in the Northern Flinders. We quickly bought a tent and food supplies (enough for weeks of being lost in the outback) and in two days I was ready to go.

The bus took me up to Copley, where I found a campfire and the milky way. Copley (pop. 104) is probably a typical outback town, but since it’s almost the only town I’ve ever been to in the outback, I can’t be sure. It’s tiny but the streets are huge and wide; there’s a caravan park, a filling station and mechanic, a shop and a pub, all in a line, but each one so far from the next there is no sense of town at all. Everything is centred around the train line which used to take coal to Adelaide, but that train stopped running a few months ago and now the campers have started using the railway sleepers as firewood. On the platform was a group of boys and their dogs hanging around, just sitting there, not waiting for anything.

In the morning, as I was packing up my tent, a woman came and invited me over for a piece of sourdough bread she had baked in her caravan the night before. She and her husband were some of the “grey nomads” who escape the cold winter weather and head for sunshine. And then in the caravan park café I got talking to a photographer who had just returned from Arkaroola and he bought me coffee – everyone was just so generous and helpful!

Originally I had planned to hitch a lift from Copley to Arkaroola with the mailman, but in the morning I was told that a delivery man had come to collect $9000 worth of meat from the caravan park, so instead I squeezed into the refrigerated van with an enormous puppy who sat and licked my face. Roger, the driver, was a fan of Scottish islands and history and we talked more Brexit; he told me about the geology of the landscape and Arkaroola’s removal of the sheep and cattle to restore the landscape, and just as we turned to look at one particularly interesting mountain formation, we drove into a signpost.

We passed some aboriginal villages advertising aboriginal cultural tours, and took a detour to visit an abandoned homestead. Roger compared the invasion of Australia and introduction of sheep to the Highland Clearances, which gave me a new perspective on the barrenness of the landscape (and great-grandfather Bob’s 13 sheep stations). But while the landscape might have been very different several hundred years ago, it was still extraordinarily green from all the rain and full of life.

150km later we arrived at Arkaroola. The geology is amazing and enough to turn anyone into an amateur geologist. The earth looks soft and malleable as it is squashed and pushed upwards and oozes and spills over. Each layer of rocks is about 9000 years, and they say the landscape is 2 billion years old, whatever that means.

Part of Roger’s job at Arkaroola is to act as a kind of ranger, and he invited me night spotting that evening. When it got dark he drove round in an open buggy and we set off down a track. It was only once he’d turned off the headlights and switched on the torch that I saw the great rifle on the mattressed bonnet. A voice in my head piped up (it’s only now, when the power cuts out completely, that this voice appears – the first time this trip): what are you doing in the dark getting into a car with a strange man and a gun?

Most people who come to visit never think of going out at night but it’s one of the best times to see wildlife, and they don’t seem to mind the light. We saw lots of kangaroos (or euros, common wallroo) and huge numbers of yellow footed rock wallabies, which were once endangered but are now so common at Arkaroola they’re considering introducing a predator. Suddenly Roger tensed and became very still: a rabbit, spawn of the English devil (along with cats). He picked up the rifle, took aim, and the rabbit ran away. We drove after it through the trees and bushes, but never saw it again.

I don’t think the folk at Arkaroola are used to people who don’t have their own car, and they don’t get many English people either. I was extremely lucky: not only did I get staff meals to warm me up, but I was even offered a free scenic flight. It was just awful luck it was to wrong place at the wrong time. And they said I should go back and work there!

Besides bushwalking, the main attraction of Arkaroola is the “world famous” ridgetop tour along an old mining track. They specially designed 4 wheel drives for this which can fit ten people in the back; we all had to hang on as we drove up and down the mountains along red mud tracks, which got so steep at points that they had been turned into staircases. Our driver had brilliant stories and nuggets of geology, but it was very difficult to concentrate on something so academic when we were hurtling around precipices and my fellow passengers were screaming.

At the top was an absolutely fabulous view across the mountains, and we were given lamingtons and milo (I imagine this evokes nostalgia for Australians) as the sun set and everything glowed red.

At night time the temperature really fell. The first morning at Arkaroola I got out of my tent to find it steaming like a haystack. The second morning I reached out to unzip the door and felt a solid wall, hardened by a layer of ice. But I was saved by my merino, yet again.

I’d been promised a lift back to Copley with someone. It turned out to be a convoy of six 4wds heading around central Australia and across the Simpson desert. They were pretty serious about it: they’d been planning the journey for 12 months and had got their cars specially fitted out with extra storage and adjusted suspension for the corrugated roads. Each car had one long aerial for radio communication (so they could let the cars behind know if there was a bumpy creek coming up or an emu in the road) and another long aerial which turned into a 3m long sand flag. It rather puts an end to my dreams of crossing the outback, just as I was getting a taste for it.

Another flight. I moved myself into suburban Adelaide for a couple of weeks, watching the lorikeets feed outside the windows and waiting for a koala to cross the garden. Alan and Jan live a life of what I might call suburban hedonism, where ‘moderation’ is forbidden and philistinism revered. I was delighted to see they are continuing my grandmother’s chocolate drawer.

I didn’t see very much of the city centre; it’s the dead season in the “Festival State”, so yet another place I’ll have to come back to. But I did visit some of the museums and galleries, including the Museum of Economic Botany, a very old fashioned dark room full of cabinets displaying ancient specimens of plants with explanations of how they are used by aborigininals and trade. I also spent a long time looking at Pacific cultures, and was transfixed by a very strange video of a man hunting sharks, in which the spirits of his ancestors live, with magic, a harpoon and his bare hands.

Afterwards, walking along North Terrace I was stopped by a man from a bush conservation charity: “Is that a Yorkshire accent? Where are you from?” “London.” “Oh, I thought so.”

As I passed the Grand Lodge of South Australia I saw a sign announcing free guided tours every Thursday afternoon at 2 pm. It just so happened to be 2 pm on Thursday, so I went in and met the 84 year-old Freemason guide; it was just the two of us in the end. We began in the basement looking at the parquet floor in rooms smelling of orange squash and soft biscuits and then worked our way up into the main rooms. He showed me the hierarchy of dusty aprons and lit up the red star on the floor and the letter ‘G’ hanging from the ceiling (“it stands for geometry, not God”), and then let me sit in the Master’s chair and bang the hammer! When he joined in his twenties there were 26,000 Freemasons in South Australia; now there are 2,400. They must be really desperate for new members.

I wanted to know what they actually do in their meetings. “Well, there’s the usual business of meetings, you know, the minutes of the last meeting, accounts, and then there’s a lot of ceremony”. So they don’t really do anything, as far as I can tell. When I asked about the loving cup, he started talking about his recent trip to London and how he had hobnobbed with the grandchildren of the Russian Tsars. We went back downstairs and he handed me a leaflet on joining the Order of the Eastern Star; the leaflet had photos of middle aged women in long white skirts talking to other middle aged women in long white skirts. It was all rather sad.

We went on weekend drives beyond Adelaide, along long straight roads lined with gum trees. Every time we stopped so I could jump out to take a photo, I was hit by the smell of eucalyptus. At points there were whole sections of woodland where the trunks were charred black from bushfires.”Koala!” Jan suddenly shouted as we hurtled along. And there it was, hugging a tree, sharp claws and fluffy fur, staring down at us.

We drove through glorious rolling hills covered in vineyards and wineries producing some of the best wine in the world. We tasted tawny port, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Riesling, pretending to detect overtones of orange blossom and lines of acidity between the notes of Christmas pudding and prune. As we passed through the Barossa and Clare valleys, Alan and Jan told me stories of their time hot air ballooning, pointing out landing spots, complaining about the stresses of weather and wind changes, and giggling about the proposals Alan has prodded men through. Going south to the Murray River and beyond, we made a half-hearted attempt to go whale watching, but our failure was irrelevant in the evening sunlight glowing on the rocks and the turquoise water.

The Australian election was rather less exciting than the Brexit drama, but at least it moved at a pace you could keep up with. I queued up to vote and met the leader of the Green Party in South Australia (I think). A famous man I’m told. The current in-party is the Nick Xenephon Team, formed around an independent MP; it seems pretty decent and sensible, but every time I see a poster with his face on, it just seems like a bizarre anti-gambling personality cult.

Alan and Jan have been so generous. It is the debt of one generation to the next. On my last morning, as the wind lashed about, we ate toasted crumpets with caviar and chocolate milk, and went for a walk on the beach. An idyllic farewell to the mainland.

I’m not sure why I chose to end my overland travels in Hong Kong, but now I had to fly to Melbourne. The flight was painless and dull, reinforcing my desire to stop flying altogether. Perhaps this means I’m stuck here for a while.

I descended into the thick wintery mist hanging over Melbourne and was greeted by my uncle Alan and his vanishing car. It felt like arriving home at the end of an adventure, like a silent smelly savage returned to civilization, even though I know there’s a whole new hemisphere to explore. I met my gorgeous 17-month-old first cousin once removed (now a professional model) and I was initiated into the world of car racing.

Winter was promised, but I could only snigger and feel superior – no one’s even wearing a coat. There was a little bit of rain, to be fair, but nowhere near enough to justify the cafe signboards advertising central heating and mulled wine.

Melbourne is cool. It’s got a real hipster vibe and an obsession with protein. Industrial warehouses and rather elegant Victorian houses have become coffee shops serving turmeric lattes and tim tam toffee doughnuts, while old pubs with dark green tiles serve craft beers (“as cold as your ex-girlfriend’s heart” – there, that proves the weather – and served in schooners not pints). Monochrome people walk around in long coats, hats and skinny jeans, sipping green smoothies. Vintage clothes shops line streets whose walls are plastered with peeling posters and graffiti.

The names are lovely (Fitzroy, Collingwoood, Sassafras, Ferntree Gully) and have been recycled from other places, which makes them easy to remember, but navigation is a nightmare because they’ve messed up the positioning. Whoever heard of Brighton being just south of Malvern, or Kew being east of the Southbank, or Box Hill north of Notting Hill! At least Croydon seems to be in the right place.

Outside the city, in the wonderfully named Dandenongs, is a rainforest. We drove out, past moulting gum trees dripping with bark, to a little spot for afternoon tea with tablecloths and lorikeets. How nice it is to rediscover quaintness.

The museums and galleries are stylish and superb. I’ve also discovered that most of Hollywood seems to be Australian. There’s a fabulous moving image museum putting this in context, going from the early, rather racy, Hollywood movies to the weirdest Youtube videos and internet memes, and ending in shadow puppetry. So there was loads to do, even for the non-yummy mummy.

People seemed enormously friendly and genuinely interested in you, from the coffee shop waitresses to the museum security guards. Or at least they all beamed and started chatting to me about Brexit and whatnot (they were upset Britain ever joined the EU in the first place). I’ve decided to try and adopt the sunny Aussie disposition, so even though I didn’t see any penguins at St Kildas, it doesn’t matter – I’ll be back!