Phyllis sipped on a martini, a pink martini, and sighed. My God, these Australians can make good martinis, she thought to herself, and sipped some more. As the drink explored her stomach, she stretched out a lazy leg and perused the slow progress of the Hunter River, settled well down in the river flats at the end of its run. She too settled down, on a balcony at the back of a café in the old river port of Morpeth. Once, well before the river silted up, steamers had come up river from the coal port of Newcastle. Now, in a world short of oil, tons of coal went down the valley to be shipped day and night around the world. It was the Hunter's contribution to global warming.

But Morpeth was a treasure, she thought. Still a small town which had one day woken up to the fact that it had a colourful history, that the crumbling sandstone buildings on the single main street were actually quite something, that the single lane wooden bridge crossing the Hunter should stay, and that the theologians on the hill in the grand old residence weren't all weirdos.

She had finished another hard day at the theological college, St. Johns. Thankfully liberal with a good dose of high church Anglicanism, they had brought her out to give a series of lectures. She had come here to claim the Bible back from both the fundos and its secular detractors.