A Town Like Alice A Town Like Alice A Town Like Alice (United States title: "The Legacy") is a romance novel by Nevil Shute, published in 1950 when Shute had newly settled in Australia. Jean Paget, a young Englishwoman, becomes romantically interested in a fellow prisoner of World War II in Malaya, and after liberation emigrates to Australia to be with him, where she attempts, by investing her substantial financial inheritance, to generate economic prosperity in a small outback community — to turn it into "a town like Alice" i.e. Alice Springs. The story falls broadly into three parts. In Post-World War II London,
A Town Like Alice (1956 film) where Joe lived before the war, and is much impressed with the quality of life there. She then travels to the (fictional) primitive town of Willstown in the Queensland outback, where Joe has become the manager of a cattle station. Meanwhile, Joe has learnt that Jean survived the war and that she was not married. He travels to London to find her, using money won in a lottery. It is some time before they are reunited in Alice Springs and they fall in love immediately. Leslie Norman expressed interest in making a film of the novel in 1952. The script