More residents of this peaceful south Australian city have been killed by sharks than by terrorists, but US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld brought a whiff of global fear with him on a visit yesterday.
From an outdoor cafe in the center of town, with a breeze ruffling the leaves of shade trees under a clean blue sky, the upmarket Hyatt Hotel across the road looks like a prison.
Emergency fences 5m high block access to the long, lazy driveways, squads of police patrol the grounds and guards with attack dogs sniff the sidewalks among passers-by.
Adelaide, the capital of South Australia state, is unused to this sort of attention -- making its rare appearances in international news mainly through attacks on surfers and divers by great white sharks.
Schoolchildren walk by the anti-terrorist Hyatt fences, wearing laid-back uniforms of shorts, T-shirts and wide-brimmed hats which protect them from the much greater threat of skin cancer in this sun-drenched city.
In the cafe, a sign outlaws smoking within 1m of the bar, as Australia tries to wean its populace off a habit that is blamed for killing more people in a year than terrorism has killed in the history of the world.
Rumsfeld's visit, to shore up a military alliance which has seen Prime Minister John Howard contribute troops to the US-led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, is a strange sideshow in the world's terrorism circus.
A block away from the Hyatt, a small group of demonstrators, probably less than 200, gathered on the steps of the state parliament to denounce Rumsfield's presence.
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