I think she would have felt like she was always the second-best. The death of the first wife would have hung over them. And I think she spent enough time around him to know that the electricity wasn’t there. Jean is practical, but also a romantic or she’d never had made the trip to Australia.
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Rethinking my earlier post after reading what @Mary13 wrote:
I actually agree with most of it. I think my problem might be hearing Jean’s love story by way of Noel’s dispassionate summarizing of it. The old adage of “show don’t tell” got flipped on its head here. It is little more than “tell.” All the behind-the-scenes feelings that Jean and Joe have remain behind the scenes and I am left to wonder how thoughts of marriage cropped up immediately six years later.
And it’s fortunate that Jean is willing to exchange her life so completely for a totally different one. Willing and able, I guess. Because while Joe thinks marrying Jean a bonza idea, he expects her to be the one to fit in to his life rather than vice versa. (At least at the point I am in the book.)
For what it’s worth, I’d probably love the mini-series. It’d be more show than tell.
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I love the way @buenavista put it:
@ignatius, I think you would like the mini-series (although it’s dated – has that 1980’s quality in terms of film and sound).
Speaking of such things, on a more light-hearted note, Joe is described in the book as “fair-haired,” “powerfully built,” and “about five feet ten in height.” To me, that says….hmmmm…maybe a young Daniel Craig? But I was perfectly happy with Bryan Brown playing the role in the mini-series. 
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There are some interesting interviews about the making of them mini-series. For one thing, Bryan Brown was unknown with little experience and they had to fight to get him cast. The producers also had to fight to film the village well scenes because the country was insulted that it would take a foreigner to conceive of the need and get it built.
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Bumping my post with the links to the miniseries.
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Oh my word, I enjoyed this book, for many reasons! I took the advice not to read reviews, so the plot twist hit me right in the heart.
Among other aspects, I appreciated the realistic, matter-of-fact descriptions of communication (bush radio! telegrams!) and transportation (tramp steamer … prop plane …) of that day – not long before my lifetime, but such a different world.
Coincidentally, my husband was listening to The Storm We Made, mentioned above, about the same time. He was astounded that the author had characters getting news of the end of WWII via transistor radio – which hadn’t been invented then! Then his history-scholar mind started poking about in “what else wasn’t real” about that story – which he had been enjoying up till then. I guess I, too, like my fiction to reflect the real world.
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@Marilyn, thank you for those wonderful links! Having just watched the mini-series, I loved getting the backstory via the interview with the producer. Among other things, it explained why they changed Robin’s gender:
"The baby in A Town Like Alice is my daughter, Melissa. The series is a great home movie for her. But no other parent would want to put their kids through that. We were lucky that we had her to put in the show, because it was very hot filming in Malaysia, and being in all those scenes was quite difficult. Every time she cried, the director said, ‘Give her a banana.’ To this day, she can’t eat bananas.”
@jollymama, One of the advantages to reading a book set around the same time it was written is that it’s hard to get the history wrong!
From Wikipedia: “In 1948, Shute flew his own Percival Proctor aeroplane to Australia and back, accompanied by the writer James Riddell, who published a book, Flight of Fancy, based on the trip, in 1950.”
So I expect he described plane travel quite accurately in A Town Like Alice. I have a low tolerance for obvious anachronisms in books, but admittedly, it’s rarely an issue because I don’t have a good memory for historical details – dates of inventions and whatnot.
Here’s a related tidbit from the series of interviews with the producer of the mini-series:
.“…I think, and I say humbly, I was known as a producer with attention to detail. I like to think that a lot of the details were pretty good. Except for a scene where Noel is getting examined by the doctor. I was criticised because the period stethoscope we used was not invented until five years later. Somebody wrote me a letter about that, about how it had destroyed the whole series for him. There’s an expert on everything. Attention to creative detail is really important.”
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Some personal backstory to explain one reason this book grabbed me …
Mr Jollymama and I started our romance as Peace Corps volunteers, living 60 miles apart in a tropical country – a day’s journey by hitchhiking on dirt roads. Traveling was pretty unpredictable, and communication was primitive … we’d send letters via traveling priests, and if we made a date, we’d sure better keep it, as there was no way to let the other one know plans had changed.
When I was medevaced and flown back to the States, there was no way to let him know! But fortunately his post had a shortwave radio receiver, and he heard the “daily check-in” of Peace Corps news across the country – just like in the book! – with no details but enough to worry him. And, after a summer of letters crossing in transatlantic mail, we managed to arrange where and when to meet again. (It all worked out 
)
I’m no Jean, and I’m not saying my journey was like being force-marched across Malaya!! But her story rang a lot of chimes with me.
Yes, I think that’s true for me too. I spent two years of my childhood in Hargeisa, Somalia and while the wildlife was different the dry season/wet season flooding and the red earth are very similar.
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@mathmom : Please explain again why you and your family were in Somalia. Thanks.
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Moving to the dark side…
Being the 1940’s-1950’s, racism seeps into the novel. “Mrs. Boong” is an endearment in the book and “Abo” is used regularly and, in the context of the story, without malice. And yet:
Although ‘Abo’ is still considered quite offensive by many, the pejorative ‘boong’ is now more commonly used when the intent is deliberately to offend, as that word’s status as an insult is unequivocal.
List of ethnic slurs - Wikipedia.
And then there is this cringe-inducing exchange between Jean and Joe:
‘Joe,’ she said once, ’what do I do if a boong comes into the ice-cream parlor and wants a soda? A boong stockrider? Do I serve him in the same place, or has he got to have a different shop?’
He scratched his head. ‘I dunno that it’s ever happened in Willstown. They go into Bill Duncan’s store. I don’t think you could serve them in an ice-cream parlour, with a white girl behind the counter.’
She said firmly, ’Then I’ll have to have another parlour for them with a black girl in it. There’s such a lot of them, Joe — we can’t cut them out. We’ll have two parlours, with the freezes and the kitchen between.’ (p. 171).
There is no doubt in my mind that this part of the story was intended to cast Jean in a good light: forward-thinking, good-hearted, and fair. But of course, she was proposing the odious Separate but Equal policy. And yet, that probably was forward-thinking at the time for Australia, whose official policy only 20 years earlier was still to “extinguish” the full-blooded aboriginal people. Racism in Australia - Wikipedia
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I was in Hargeisa from 1964-66 when my Dad was assigned to open a post there, so that there would be an US official who would be close to the newly assigned Peace Corps volunteers. He was in the Foreign Service.
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What adventures you’ve had @jollymama.
I think your comment “ I’m no Jean” should be come a meme …….she was quite the Saint, a super heroine.
Maybe you aren’t a “Jean” who is, but I bet you are a great “ jollymama”………
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Always curious about your journeys, @mathmom. Did you also mention upthread, you lived in Japan? Perhaps that was another participant? Fascinating 
No that was me! I’ve lived in Thailand (too young to remember), Japan (both Tokyo and Yokohama), Somalia (both Hargeisa and Mogadishu) with my parents. Then Tours in France, Munich in Germany and three months in Hong Kong on my own.
In Hargeisa we had a few horses and I went off riding alone (age 9 or so!) fell off and the horse went home without me. Luckily I wasn’t hurt, and we had telephones so I walked to the expat club and was able to call home from there.
The people who stayed in the African colonies reminded me a lot of the Australians. Town life revolving around the bar, plenty of can do spirit and a real love of the landscape, though in their case it wasn’t theirs any more.
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Very cool, @mathmom! Are you still a world traveler?
Yes, I love traveling and there are still a million places left to see on my bucket list, but I don’t know if we’d ever actually go live somewhere again. We were in Hong Kong because DH got an offer to do a sabbatical semester there, but now that he’s retired those opportunities won’t fall into our laps again! My younger son (who seemingly caught the bug) is in the Navy and living in England now, so our plan is to make as many trips as possible while he’s there - either to England or to see other parts of Europe. We are going to Spain in April and he and his wife will spend a few days with us.
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Aw, that makes my day, @jerseysouthmomchess !
Has anyone ever done any extensive train travel?
Early in the novel, when describing Alice Springs to Jean, Joe tells her that “People come up on the 'Ghan from Adelaide” (p. 63).
I didn’t know anything about the Ghan (short for Afghan Express), so I looked it up:
The Ghan 90th Anniversary - Journey Beyond Rail.
The History of The Ghan Railway
I always thought I’d like to take a long train trip, but it’s probably more uncomfortable and tedious in reality than in the imagination.
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I love train travel, and if it’s something you would like to do, I don’t think you would find it tedious at all.
A couple of times when my kids were younger, we decided to travel by train to a vacation destination via Amtrak and we splurged on a sleeper cabin – so much fun to have our own room/roomette with bunks that fold up and chairs that fold down! Plus, there is a private dining car with tables and tablecloths (like The Orient Express) and the food was amazingly good. And there was a lounge car where you could sit in comfortable seats and look out the large window.
And then, unlike car/plane travel, you can walk around anywhere you want.
Amtrak used to have some “All Across America” deals – I should check to see if they still exist!
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