A town just like Alice

Tuesday 27th February 2007

I’m writing this at 6.30 am on Wednesday on the patio of the All Seasons Oasis Hotel at Alice Springs. Well, yesterday was interesting. We left Port Douglas for a late morning flight to Alice Springs. As soon as you fly out of Cairns and head inland there is this most amazing nothingness. Literally, thousands of miles of nothingness. One of the reasons we wanted to come to the ‘Red Centre’ (apart from seeing the sights) was to experience the real outback. The flight from Brisbane up to Cairns was two and a half hours, and both those places are in one State (Queensland). Alice Springs is in the southern part of the Northern Territory and bang in the centre of the country. Now, I knew Australia was big and the population small, before I came here. But it’s very hard to understand just how big and how small until you’re here. For example the population is 19 million. Compare that to Beijing with a population (from memory) of 16 million and Shanghai with, I think, 19 million. Also 90% of Australia’s people live round the edge – all the coastal cities. So, I suppose it’s not surprising that once you head to the centre, it’s empty.

Of course, we’d seen A Town Like Alice what seemed like a few hundred times, although I’ve never read the book. It’s a bit different today of course, but as the major town in the centre of the country, it still has a population of only 26,000. So, it’s small, but there were two things here we particularly wanted to see. We picked up the biggest four-wheel-drive you can imagine, at the airport and came into town to drop the cases at the hotel. The temperature was 380C. We’d bought fly nets (which we will model in a photo for you!) at the airport because the main resemblance to A Town Like Alice is the flies everywhere – they don’t bite, but are a bit of a nuisance, though you quickly get used to them, develop the Aussie Wave, and get rid of the fly nets.

First stop after that was the School of the Air.
Nothing to do with flying, but the ‘school’ set up in 1919 to teach children in remote areas over VHF radio. This was absolutely their only contact with the world outside their sheep stations and farms and I think I’d heard about it when I was a child. Apparently, one former pupil now runs a hotel chain in the UK and others are doctors and lawyers around the world. This ‘radio-only’ contact continued until 2003 when they moved over to Internet teaching and the children now come into Alice Springs with their parents twice a year for teacher contact and social contact with each other. Today there are still 86 pupils (aged from 4-12 – after 12 they go to boarding schools) and a lesson was taking place from the studio whilst we were there. The furthest pupil lives more than 1000kms from the ‘school’. Only 12 of the pupils are from Aboriginal families as, we were told, the Aboriginals mostly live in communities where they teach their children within the community. Many dignitaries have visited the ‘school’ in Alice, including Prince Charles and Di, and Margaret Thatcher (maybe the only school she visited and didn’t then close???). A fascinating, quirky place.

Then on to the original Flying Doctor station. Maybe this doesn’t seem such an oddity today when Air Ambulances are so common, but again, we’d watched The Flying Doctor on black and white TVs as kids, and so wanted to see the real thing.
This again, still runs today (though not with the original morse code communications and along with 25 others throughout Australia, covering an area bigger than the whole of Western Europe) and whilst we were there three planes were out on calls. The service deals with emergencies (there are six doctors, six nurses and six pilots who work out of Alice in three planes) but also does general health care and preventative medicine today. Again, a very interesting visit.

Towards the end of this busy day we flopped around the hotel pool because the temperature by 5pm must have dropped to around 350C! There we met a lovely Canadian couple, Tim and Debbie from Toronto, and had drinks with them. They’d booked dinner at the Overlanders Steakhouse and invited us to join them which we did. A riotous place where after trying hors d’ouevres of crocodile vol au vent (farmed, cos the other crocs are a protected species!), kangaroo fillet, emu medallion (farmed) and Camel Fillet with plum sauce, we all had to stand in a circle
and sing Home Among the Gum Trees, and Waltzing Matilda. We stuck to chicken kebabs for our main course!

We then moved on to the Bojangles Bar which Tim and Debbie had told us about around the pool. From 8pm they switch on live webcams, placed around the bar and the dance floor, and go live on the internet, so that you can wave to friends and family who you have warned to be online at that time. Well, Ben managed it and texted me to say we looked ‘very relaxed’. You can interpret that for yourselves! Ian was on a day off from work and struggling with his connection and mum had hospital appointments. But I guess it was more fun for us, waving at Ben at 10.30 pm after a few bottles of wine, than it would have been for him watching us? This town is truly on the backpackers trail and so I suppose that’s how this ‘service’ started. Lots of gap year youngsters waving to mum and dad back home (presumably to show they’re still alive). A great fun night. Off to Kings Canyon in ‘the Beast’ soon.