Alice Springs
in the far-off outback is a small community but held several wonderful
interesting visits. We rode the overnight Ghan
Train for the long trip. Afghani camel-trains, carrying supplies, made the
long 970-mile trek between Adelaide and Alice Springs for many years, thus the
name Ghan Train.
A paved road between the two cities did not
exist until 1980. The train traveled over level ground in the center of the
country. After the wheat fields of the Flinders Range, it was flat expanses of
salt bush. Flat, flat, flat!
After
the really nice hotels we’d been accustomed to, the very basic hotel here was a
bit of a surprise, but was about the best the city offered. It was clean and
adequate. We then wandered around the city---all five blocks of it--before visiting
the small mall. Not being very big, it held our interest for only a short while.
We studied some aboriginal art which is an interesting art form before lunch.
When I asked for a cup of tea and a glass of
ice the waitress said, “We have iced tea.” That made this Texan’s day!
The
city was originally named Stuart after an explorer but renamed Alice Springs
after Alice Todd, the wife of the telegraph station building project foreman.
In 1939 the population was 700, today the population is 26,000, and the city is
the center for Aboriginal artworks, and the base camp for Outback travelers.
Alice Springs started as a cattle town, and as
late as the 1970s the city still had a wild
west image. It now survives on the tourist trade. In the Northern
Territory, twice the size of Texas, the 178,000 people are outnumbered by sheep
and rivaled by kangaroos, dingoes and Afghan camels. There are 1600 Americans
living in Alice Springs, most are involved in the NASA tracking station at Pine
Gap. Aborigines account for 20% of the
city’s population.
At the 1792 overland telegraph station a guide
took us around the grounds and buildings. The telegraph station was set up in
Alice Springs as headquarters for a communication system. The system consisted of 12 relay stations,
one located every 250 miles from the station to Darwin. The site, three miles
from the present city, was set up at what was thought to be a watering hole,
but which turned out to be runoff from the river. Supplies came once a year
via camel. Talk about isolation.
The station had several well-preserved
buildings. In one of the homes was a piano that arrived by camel. For the trip
it was balanced with water and had to be unloaded each night and reloaded each
morning.
We ended our stay in Alice Springs with an early
morning balloon ride over the outback. In the clear dawn we saw mobs of
kangaroos hopping around as well as cattle and wild horses moving about.
We were too distant for my camera to capture the
mounds of tan that was spinifex, a mounded beach grass that covers a lot of the
bush country. The 30 varieties survive on little water by developing rolled,
sharp blades with cactus tip barbs.
We did all the traditional things of helping
to get the balloon ready for flight and having a champagne breakfast afterward.
A delightful memory of this small outback city.
You may want to visit A Unique School 10-5-11
and Flying Docs 5-15-15
