When I first arrived in Australia from St. Andrews early in 1956, two illusions were shattered. The first had been evoked by a pamphlet from Australia House which described Armidale, the town in which the University of New England is situated, as a cathedral city, and by a school atlas which seemed to place it in the Blue Mountains. I had visions of Canterbury in the Trossachs. But the reality was that Armidale then, if not now, must have been the paradigm in the mind of the person who defined Australian country towns as identical points separated by infinite distances.