Australia’s colonial gentry found it fashionable to summer in the hills. Mountain resorts at Mount Macedon in Victoria, at Toowoomba in Queensland and in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands of New South Wales and the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, offered a cooler climate, curative mountain air, exotic gardens and a place for high society to gather.

Andrea Inglis takes a close look at these antipodean hill stations, which had their Imperial or Anglo-Indian antecedents and yet a character of their own. She opens a window on a style of life that was distinctive in its aesthetics and its ideas about health and the Australian bush.