Day 15-16: 'Legendary' Alice

November 29-30, 2010

Alice is a strange place. And also beautiful. We arrive from the south through a gateway of red rock – a convenient parting of the MacDonnell Range that allows the Stuart Highway to pass through. I’d imagined Alice Springs to be a dusty, unsightly town on a flat desert plain. Nothing like it. From atop Memorial Hill, the 360˚ view offers spectacular vistas of 'mountains' – the 500km spread of the Range running east to west -- what were once 3000 meters high. After 400million years of weathering, they now stand a few hundred meters. Alice sits right in the middle of them.

Entrance to Alice Springs is through the MacDonnell Range

Alice Springs from atop the Memorial Hill

The town itself has the oddest mix of people I’ve ever seen. There’s something of the wild west here, even if it’s stuck smack dab in the middle of the continent. As we enter from the south, all we see for the first few kilometers are black people, Aboriginals ambling up and down the footpath or squatting on lawns or verges. The town isn’t big; a few streets of commerce make up the town centre and other than the ubiquitous indigenous art gallery, it could be any other Aussie town. What’s odd is the people. Set in their faces, in their bodies, in the way they dress and adorn themselves is deep-seat dysfunction: mad, angry, crazy, kooky, wild, repressed, eccentric…strangeness. The population is at least fifty percent black; the other half is a surprising mix of multiculturalism like you’d see in any big city in Australia, but which isn’t that common in rural towns. Asians, Africans, Indians, Middle Easterners. Why are they here, so far into the deep centre of Australia?

Johan says the town reminds him of Asia – developing countries who aspire to look attractive to foreign visitors, but don’t really have the knack, or the resources to pull it off -- or a population of people who appreciate the town’s decoration enough to look after it. Alice is an oasis of greenery, civic art, friendly interpretive panels explaining the history and quirkiness of the town, and lots of people, black and white, loafing about. But there’s a dirtiness to the place; as though an old woman, decrepit and unwashed, aspires to regain her lost beauty and adorns herself with fineries. But no one’s convinced.

Old black men seem fond of wearing American cowboy hats. The whites wear the standard outback Akubra hat. Though it’s a school day, young people roam the streets and through K-mart and Target. I don’t see any black people working in the shops. An old bent woman with a hunchback lumbers across the street, oblivious to traffic. An aging bikie, thinning grey hair tied back with a band, medals and trinkets roving across the front of his black leather jacket, smokes a cigarette sitting on a low wall in front of the Town Hall. A tall extremely thin girl walks down the mall with a hollow grey face; the visage of her frail body like a skeleton gives me a shiver. And everywhere, huddles of Aboriginal people, sitting cross legged on the ground, talking in their native tongue, avoiding eye contact with tourists who glare.

Our stopover in Alice is mostly practical: errands, stocking up, fixing things, emailing. We check into the nicest caravan park on the south end. In town we shop, eat ice creams and get discouraged that our mail forwarded from Pamelup a week ago hasn’t arrived. We’ll have to stay over another day.

We spend a fair amount of time on-line. The American Consulate has sent cryptic requirements for Johan to attend to prior to his 14 December interview in Sydney. We try to ring, email, but it’s impossible to contact a human being. They obviously don’t want to waste time dealing with people’s queries and problems. Figure it out yourself. It’s all on our website, is the message you get when you ring. But the answer to our question doesn’t seem to be anywhere; we’ve spent hours searching for it.

I walk through town, up to the memorial hill, down along the river walk until it gets too far south and all I see are black people sitting in huddles along the river bank or on the dry river bed. Makeshift camps, disheveled linen on dirty old mattresses, appear amongst the tall grasses. I suddenly feel unsafe and make a beeline back to town. I was going to walk back to the caravan park, but it means walking through the Aboriginal neighbourhood we drove through to get into town. I have no idea whether or not it’s safe, but it doesn’t seem a good idea on my own, so I ring Johan to come pick me up.

The Todd River runs through Alice Springs. Because it's usually dry, there are few bridges 

built over it. Most roads run right through it, with a water measure to let you know 

how deep it is should you dare to take the plunge.

This is the only bridge I found in town. Many squatters hang out under the bridge, 

on the dry river bed or its banks; a few seem to have set up camp there.

We stay a second night, which isn’t a bad thing; it’s nice to relax and chill for a couple days. No driving, no putting up and taking down the camp. Running water, electricity. A shower.

Our mail is at the post office when we check again on Tuesday so we decide to take off on Wednesday. But first we check in the Visitor Centre for road conditions along the Outback Way going east. Bad news: the heavy rains in Queensland the last couple months have washed out part of the road. It’s only passable with a high-clearance 4WD. What to do? If we attempt it and get stuck, we’re stuffed. If we can’t get through there’s no alternative route but to come back to Alice – a 500km return trip. The man behind the desk at the Visitor Centre suggests they may lift the closure any day; best to keep checking the Queensland road service website. But we don’t have a lot of time to spare and rain is forecast for most of eastern and central Queensland over the next week, making it unlikely that the situation will improve. And frankly, camping in the wet isn’t very appealing. As we need to be in Sydney in less than two weeks, we have no choice but to abandon or postpone our completion of the Outback Way.

 Town centre Alice Springs

Camping at the caravan park, Alice Springs