I suppose it’s strange that I’ve used outback colors in my website when I’m writing about the juicy green Adelaide Hills. I was brought up on a red dirt farm and I’ve travelled extensively in the outback so to me, Australia will always have red dirt.

Mainland Australia is only a little smaller than the 48 adjoining U.S. states but the inside is mostly desert. In the real outback you have to carry your own fuel because there is no gas station (petrol station) for hundreds of miles (even more, in kilometers).

In the map, the lines are the borders of South Australia. The circle pinpoints Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia.

There are 1.3 million people living in Adelaide, South Australia. The next biggest city is Mount Gambier with 26,000 people. A bit of a drop.

South Australia is bigger than Texas and more than twice the size of Germany but most people live near the coast where things grow.

In the map, the glow represents Adelaide.

So, yes, I writing about the heavily treed Adelaide Hills when South Australia is mostly outback.  The people in the Hills live above the city.

Now we walk into the land of fiction.

There are a surprising number of magnificent mansions in the Adelaide Hills, so inventing another one is not a great stretch of the truth.

I bought a model of a fictional large ornate building where actors could be sequestered away for weeks. I placed a gum tree to the side with a hedge in front because I’ll need them later in the story. The ornate fountain is merely there to help set the scene.

The New House is a complete contrast to The Mansion. It is blocky and made of modern materials and covered in solar panels. (This has reminded me I will need to add a satellite dish because the internet can be very poor in the Hills). The inside is filled with cables and electrical equipment.

Old Australian driveways are generally long and lined with trees, making it very hard to see the houses.

This gate is unusual in that it has an arch above it. The arch has to be very high because in the past, carts were piled enormously high with wool bales, but the property is no longer a working farm and even the stables are empty.

I made the walls nine feet high to begin with, but Sam needs to throw someone over them later on so they are now eight feet (2.4 metres) high.