Where It All Goes Down
Jellicoe, Australia, mid-1980s/2006
The fictional town of Jellicoe is located in the bush land of Australia, relatively isolated from the rest of the world and a several hour drive from the civilization of Sydney. When you read the descriptions of this place, it's really no wonder why Tate told Sam that Taylor was "in heaven" (23.51): Taylor describes "hills and valleys and houses and steeples, symmetrically cut farm blocks and vineyards" (9.59). Wow. If you absolutely had to go to a state-run boarding school in the middle of nowhere, Jellicoe can't be your worst option.
But natural beauty isn't all that's significant to Jellicoe. The town itself is perfectly set up for some serious mythology involving a group of kids from the 1980s who rewrote history for the next generation to come. The relative isolation of the town almost demands the creation of a war game—with the town, the school, and the cadets' camp separated by vast expanses of land, it sure doesn't seem like there's much else to do.
Ultimately, Jellicoe as a setting becomes more about what the characters transform it into than what it actually is. Check out this awesome map a friend of Melina Marchetta's made illustrating the town and you'll see that it doesn't look like much—and yet it becomes everything to the original five. Perhaps what Marchetta is trying to say by setting her book in this fictional place is that it's not necessarily a particular location that's special on its own so much as a place is made special by the relationships that form there.