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 Railway. He had later escaped execution a second time, when his "last meal" of chicken and beer could not be obtained. Crucifixion (or "Haritsuke") was a form of punishment or torture that the Japanese sometimes used against prisoners during the war. The fictional "Willstown" is reportedly based on Burketown and Normanton in Queensland, which Shute visited in 1948. (Burke and Wills were well-known explorers of Australia.) According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", the novel contains the earliest known use of the word "": "He.. made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare."