Writer Tanya Heaslip on swapping life on an Alice Springs station for the fairytale streets of Prague, and the remarkable parallels she found between these two magical worlds. Tanya was in a pub in London in 1989 when she watched on the television as the Berlin Wall came down. She was the tail end of a solo backpacking trip, which didn’t quite live up to what she’d imagined it might be as a little girl growing up on a remote cattle station near Alice Springs. But Tanya booked to go to Berlin the very next day, beginning an obsession with learning about what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. Several years later she would return to Europe, this time to the East, to the Czech Republic. There in fairytale Prague, not long after the Velvet Revolution, Tanya would fall in love with the city and into a relationship with an older man. And she would draw unexpected parallels between the magic and isolation of Prague and that of Central Australia – their people and their stories. ...