I’m driving to Adelaide for the 2012 Writers’ Week and once I pass Ararat and lose contact with my favourite radio programmes, I grab a CD. The mellow voice of tenor David Hobson and the gossipy trumpets of Handel provide the perfect backdrop to the unrolling umber paddocks of the Wimmera. Something clicks into place between Ararat and Bordertown. It’s a familiar feeling that hooks deep inside me whenever I turn back to the places where I was born and where I grew up. Later in the week when I’m interviewing Miguel Syjuco, best described as a global writer, he tells me that ‘home’ for him is in whichever city he is living in at the time. It doesn’t work for me. There’s an indescribable magnetism about returning to South Australia. I’m going home.

In 1984, at the first ever Writers’ Week, major drawcard Salman Rushdie nominated Adelaide as ‘the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film.’ ‘Adelaide’ he proclaimed ‘is Amityville or Salem, and things here go bump in the night.’ He was referring to the fact that Adelaide has had more than its share of particularly gruesome and distressing murders.

Stephen Orr has written the non-fiction book ‘The Cruel City’ about this, and asks why is it that Adelaide, a beautiful city of churches and lush gardens, a place renowned for its support of the arts and culture – has become better known as the epicentre of some of Australia’s weirdest and most brutal crimes?

These images are hard to imagine when I take what I call my ‘pilgrimage’ walk through the Botanic Gardens (surely one of the most beautiful in Australia) and along North Terrace, past the wonderful sandstone buildings, the University, the Gallery and Museum, past the gates to Government House and then cross to the Parliament building with its grand columns and the railway station, built with stone from my great grandfather’s quarry on the river Murray. Whether I like it or not I’m bonded by history and family to this beautiful city.

Of course Adelaide has a crime rate no higher than that of any other Australian city and Kerryn Goldsworthy in her recent book ‘Adelaide’ looks at the phenomenon with a different slant. Perhaps, she says, ‘the strangeness of Adelaide crime’ is ‘not unique to the city but rather highlighted and thrown into stark relief by the contrast with its carefully maintained outer image, which is both of beauty and of virtue.’ That ‘carefully maintained outer image’ is on show here at the Adelaide Festival (launched 52 years ago), and at the Writers Week that I have come to attend. We sit calmly under shady plane trees in the Women’s Memorial Gardens and listen to local and international writers talk. This is Adelaide at its most sedate.

Another jewel in the crown for Adelaide is the fact that in 1894 a Bill was passed, the first in any Australian state, to grant women the right to vote and stand for election in the Colony’s Parliament. Goldsworthy wonders whether a slightly higher number of rapes reported in Adelaide may be connected to the fact that this is a city ‘that has always been good to women in matters of education, suffrage and employment, and where women have historically had a higher degree of influence, power and autonomy than those in other Australian states.’
Surely the line between respectability and our own darkest natures is paper thin. To misquote Oscar Wilde aren’t we all in the gutter looking at the stars? Don’t we all have the potential for cruelty and selfishness? Crime writers Megan Abbott from New York and Norwegian Jo Nesbo, both here for Writers’ Week, try to plumb the dark psychology of what makes somebody a killer. Adelaide has always had this split, double personality, cruel yet respectable at the same time. Perhaps this is part of her allure and fascination.

by John Bartlett