by Arthur Groom
The town of Alice Springs, well planned, and set almost in the heart of Australia, has grown rapidly from the wild and isolated, yet friendly Overland Telegraph Station of years ago, into a modern centre of two thousand people. It dominates half the Northern Territory of Australia, and its influence spreads across the continent. It is ‘the Alice’ to all within hundreds of miles. It has an ultra-modern post-office, a large rambling hospital with insufficient staff, an important radio and Flying Doctor base. There are bitumen roads through most of the planned town area, concrete paths and drains, electric light and power, a modern concrete jail near the hospital; many bulk warehouses and modern shops, cafes, beauty parlours and billiard saloons, and the inevitable second-hand joints. There are two open-air picture shows, freezing cold in winter and melting hot in summer. The town has only two hotels, and a third being built up in concrete above all the other buildings in town. There are monuments, but no public hall, and the best place to greet a dignitary is where you first say good day to him. There are workshops, trucking yards, orchards, schools, abattoirs, and poultry farms, a sandy golf-course, race-course, tennis courts floodlit at night, sports-grounds, cricket and football fields out on the open clay-pans; and an all-night café serving omelettes and meals in the wee small hours to those who have to be entertained, or filled for the long road ahead or behind. The streets are lined by day with heavy motor-trucks and trailers, light trucks, utilities, and comparatively few touring cars fussing about like rare polished toys against the giant transports. Everyone seems to have ‘come in’ from somewhere, hundreds of miles perhaps, or is ready to ‘go out’ a hundred or a thousand miles. The sandwich bar in the main street sells sandwiches by the hundred ‘for the road’, and over at ‘The Chows’’, tea and sandwiches or a three-course meal may be had in a dim interior with all its memories of the past.
Alice Springs has a steam laundry and collection and delivery service. It runs its own newspaper, the Centralian Advocate. It has a town water-supply and storage pumped up into large steel tanks on the hundred-foot height of Billy Goat Hill beside the railway yards, separated from Nanny Goat Hill by the odd Todd River of sand and leaning river gums a hundred yards wide, and never the twain shall meet!
Drought may overlook a year or two in time and weather, and blast destruction and hot sand over the land; but in its departure it will set a flood trap to confound the unwary who doubt it will rain again. It is then that the Todd floods, and Alice Springs people protest and cry loudly to the Administration for bridges and water conservation, as millions of gallons swirl through Australia’s strangest river gateway two miles southward of the town, and on and on, to disappear in desert sand away to the south-east.
It would seem that many millions of years ago a mammoth force cut straight down with a cleaver and slit the main ridge of the Macdonnell Ranges to its base, and ordained that some day all travelling things, whether mechanical, animal, human, or bird, and even the waters themselves, should crowd between the red cliffs less than a hundred yards apart. Bitumen highway, railway line, power and phone lines, were built by men beside the sandy river whose bed is the stock route; and the airliners, going over daily, sight the gap from afar and fly above it. But east and west of Heavitree Gap there are larger and deeper gaps in the amazing series of parallel ranges that wall the heart of Australia. The barrier effect dividing north and south is so definite and impressive that one might expect to find a lost nation over the other side.
Within Heavitree Gap all sounds are magnified, and echoes of train or truck or plane above, rumble deeply. Millions of years ago, Central Australia was elevated in great plateaux, sloping and draining gently southward, until tremendous expansion from afar, and horizontal pressure over a great distance, pushed the landscape upward in gigantic corrugations.
In the Old Days the scientist was the main visitor of the month or year. The scientists who come and go now, do so quietly; overshadowed by Alice Springs’ annual crop of winter tourists, arriving by plane daily, or by train each Saturday up from Adelaide to friendly greeting and flurry of local curiosity; or sometimes by car or truck up via the long, lonely, rough and difficult desert road from the south, or down by the Great Northern bitumen highway from Darwin. They seek exciting adventure described in tourist folders, and find that a modern town has risen above the graves of the earliest settlers. They wander in bewilderment, looking, perhaps, for the things written of years ago. They learn to like Alice Springs’ dry, clear, winter climate, and the neat homes and lawns, flowers, and orange-trees, the drooping pepperinas; and the modern school with its pupils in all the known shades from black to white. They like the clean bitumen streets, and the big gum-trees left in the centre of the main thoroughfares. They stand and look at the modern hostels for aborigines and for white people, and admire the thrilling insignia above the Flying Doctor’s white stone gateway, glaring in contrast against the pink and red of Mount Gillen, a mile or so southward. There is the contrast of the modern business-man just up by plane to talk insurance with the Old Pioneer and all his friends and family. Over all, there is a friendliness that has never died out from the Old Days, but has sorted itself into cliques and groups in business and private life; and a new, and sometimes humorous or frantic interest in public welfare.
Some day, Central Australia’s transition period will form a pattern. It was emerging from the old order and gathering tempo when Japan’s treachery in the Pacific gave it military importance, and rapidly modernized the locality of the town in contrast to the surrounding wilderness of desert and plain, and high rugged mountains with hidden waters. General Douglas MacArthur flew non-stop from the Philippines and landed at Alice Springs; and thousands of people who have forgotten the name of the town still remember the event.
The future of Alice Springs has gripped its people. Everyone is now civic planner and critic in one, and the town buzzes with nebulous schemes. It is proof of civic pride, and many of the old-timers wonder where it will all lead to, for already the pubs are often overcrowded with tourists, and some old-timers find that the beds, once saved automatically for rare visitors into town from far out, are now occupied by pale-faced people in city clothes and collar and tie.
The sandy banks of the Todd are still good to camp on.
You drive now from the bitumen roads of the town area, straight out onto desert sand or rocky wilderness in one or another direction, as suddenly as going through a gate. The exception is the bitumen Sturt Highway, built as a wartime necessity from the large aerodrome six miles south of Alice Springs, nearly one thousand miles northward to Darwin.
Sand and erosion have obliterated many of the old camel pads that lead through deep mountain passes, and mechanical transport has chosen new routes. Much of Central Australia’s scenery is now panoramic, from a window; and often viewed from a distance in a passing show of blue and purple shadows, dominated by masses of towering red rock.
CHAPTER II
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
From January 1922 until June 1925 I worked at Lake Nash Cattle Station on the eastern side of the Northern Territory, adjoining the Queensland border. Geographically, the several thousand square miles of Lake Nash country were cut off from the rest of the Northern Territory by eighty miles of spinifex desert to westward, and small strips of mallee and clay-pan desert to north and south.
From the lovely Aghadaghada Waterhole at the western end of Lake Nash run, an old camel pad led out over the ‘eighty miles dry’; and stories were legion of the many tons of mica that had been camel-packed in from Hatch’s Creek west of the desert. There was the story of the full-sized piano that had ‘gone out’ from Queensland on the back of an old bull camel, only to be eaten by white ants and filled with shifting sand. Round the campfires in the stock camps I listened, and heard tales of Blue Bob the B—, of Dancing Paddy the Irishman, of the Harbour Master, who named all the ducks on a waterhole after tugs in the Brisbane River, and of Sandover Bill, who was credited with driving thirty-six bullocks to Ade
laide, himself mounted on a lonely cow camel; of Jumping Jack the Poisoner, the Tropical Frog and the Old Waterhen, Tin-toe Harry, the Kynuna Lady, and Billy the Pig; and scores of others whose idiosyncrasies named them.
But they were all men of the elusive West, which is always west of where the tales are told, at least one more day’s travel beyond tomorrow.
We had mustered and were holding nearly two thousand mixed cattle near Elditta Waterhole on Gordon’s Creek. It was midday, and warm for June, with dancing mirages that rolled blackly across the plain to northward and burst in dazzling waves against dark gidyea forests. Some miles to eastward we noticed a grotesque sprawling movement. It was too slow to be a car caught in the mirage; and it was much too large and wide. It twisted and cavorted over some hundreds of yards of ground. Not a mob of cattle, surely? No one else had any right to muster on the Lake Nash run. Not horses? Where would they be going? It all rose and fell and squirmed as one broad mass, confounding our early guesses, until a covered vehicle drawn by two horses, emerged from the distortion, became definite and moved up beside a flock of several hundred sheep and goats.
A hundred questions presented themselves to us, and we left the cattle with native boys and rode across to intercept the strange convoy. Where were they going? This was not a normal stock route. Someone lost, off his course, many miles west of any known sheep country. No sheep had ever passed that way before. The sight was almost unbelievable. Two children were riding ponies and droving the mixed herd. A woman drove the old vehicle. She had two small children beside her. Several bantams squawked in a coop slung beneath the van. We questioned the man who appeared to be in charge. What was he doing? Where was he going? Didn’t he know there was desert beyond the Aghadaghada Waterhole, and only camels had gone out before in the direction he was heading?
His answers were simple and astounding. Yes, he knew of the desert. He had been nearly six months on the road from Mungindi on the border of Queensland and New South Wales; and he was going ‘out’ to the Sandover River country, east of the Overland Telegraph Line. He had chosen a locality on a map that showed only broad white space, crossed by the uncertain, unknown, broken lines of the Sandover River, so little known that is was still a mystery whether its rare waters went south-west or north-east!
He intended to take up land somewhere ‘out there’, and breed sheep in defiance of all the accepted beliefs and principles. He had faith in himself and his family. They were all in it together, and all knew that a tough time lay ahead.
And that was all there was to it. Surely it was utter lunacy, yet his remarks were simple and convincing, almost terrifying, and left us entirely without answer. We persuaded him to accept fresh beef; and the strange procession moved slowly on across the flat red clay-pans beside Gordon’s Creek, and on in the direction of the last known water at Aghadaghada, sixty miles away.
It was not until a mirage to the westward had spread once more like a dancing octopus, and engulfed them all, that we realized we did not know the man’s name.
That night, and many other nights, I sat beside a campfire, and thought of that brave insane family. It brought a craving to do something just as brave and big. Dead west there was little known settlement before Barrow Creek Telegraph Station on the Overland Telegraph Line, two hundred and fifty-five miles by air. In between, the Sandover River wandered vaguely through desert land; its course was known to move north and south to the vagaries of uneven seasons. We had mustered cattle well out beyond the Aghadaghada Waterhole, and had always turned back at the beginning of a land known to very few, but often spoken of by natives as ‘Eighty miles dry country – no water.’
Weeks and months went by, and no word came through. A few wandering natives reported tracks west of Aghadaghada, and well out over the desert; but rain had fallen and covered all tracks beyond. It was the only good news in a story of faith and grit that might have finished without an ending.
It happened in June 1923.
Months later, in the full heat of summer, the desert west of Lake Nash Station was crossed again; but this time up from the south-west and over a long curve towards the east. My wood-cutting camp was beside a small muddy pool, seventy miles west of the homestead. I rose one hot morning to find that nearly one hundred and fifty natives had ‘come in’ during the night, stealthily and unseen, and were camped about in small groups. They were dirty and diseased, hungry and miserable, the obvious remnants of a dying race. There was little I could do for them. I could obtain no coherent story; but they spoke of Lunderundtera and Ilgulla Waterholes, and of Arltunga, one hundred and fifty miles to the south-west. It appeared that they were not wanted somewhere, and had been warned off. They had come through to an area new and strange to them, tired, dispirited, and lethargic. They knew nothing of the white man and his family who had gone west six months before, and my attempts to describe a flock of sheep to them were hopeless.
A few weeks later heavy rain set in, filled up gaping thirsty cracks, and bogged the plains. The small watercourse known as Vivey’s Creek ran a banker, and then suddenly swelled and rumbled with a far greater volume of water than the restricted watershed of Vivey’s would allow. I knew then that somehow the Sandover had flooded, and found an old or a new course to the east.
Once again I began to wonder what had happened to the man and his family who had gone west half a year before. It was one of those persistent, unanswered questions of youth that often decide the pathway of the man.
In 1925 I left the eastern side of the Northern Territory and wandered down to Brisbane. Two unanswered questions went with me, and persisted throughout the years. Some day I would go back, and possibly a long way farther back behind the desert west and south of Aghadaghada; and possibly I would find out the name of the man who had taken faith and loyalty and crossed the desert; and even more important, perhaps, I might find out what was being done to ease the passing of Australia’s primitive man.
CHAPTER III
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
The opportunity to return to Central Australia did not occur until the winter of 1946. By then many more questions had cropped up, and I felt that some of the answers might be found at Alice Springs. I had read accounts and studied rough maps of its surrounding mountains rising to nearly five thousand feet. Mountains of such height must be separated by ravines and wild watercourses; and there would be hidden valleys between towering cliffs, and many mysterious places beyond the ordinary travel of man.
And thus I wanted to see if Central Australia’s scenery was grand enough, the climatic conditions moderate enough, to warrant tourist development in any large degree; and I wanted to find out what degree of protection over the native men and women and the wilderness areas they roamed in, might be necessary to preserve intact the heart of our continent for the education and benefit of future generations.
On Australia’s Victory Day of June 1946 I flew by airliner from Brisbane one thousand two hundred and ninety-eight miles to Adelaide; and then, after a few hours’ rest in noisy Adelaide while its people still frolicked in the streets, I went up again before dawn into the dark void above the city’s lights. The plane circled widely and thrummed up into heavy cloud. It muffled the engines. We had a full list of passengers and crew. The man beside me had scored a window seat; he stretched about six and a half feet of body and limbs and settled down to ignore the daylight when it came; and mumbled quite a lot about needing at least a week of sleep to recover from the Victory celebrations.
Daylight crept in and grew strong. Then we broke the clouds and flew up into the sun. I reached awkwardly across the sleeper and wiped the window, which had become moist with vapour, and looked down on Australia’s inland pattern, now clearly coloured desert.
Red, pink, brown, and grey rock, sand, and earth struggled to conquer diminishing belts of forest. As we sped northward into brightness of colour and deeper blue sky, the red gradually dominated all colours and became the base upon which all the land patterned itself. White-rimmed salt la
kes, some of them azure blue and sometimes grey or green towards the centre, sometimes clear with large patches of gleaming white sand, stood out against the dominant red. We went down on to the Mount Eba aerodrome in its tremendous isolation west of the long railway stretching up from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It is a pebbly landing field, with a radio station, a large nearby wool-shed, and a near and far panorama of billions of small oval red pebbles, over which I walked for warmth in the cold, bright winter sunlight. A little old man with a peaked beard manipulated a noisy putt-putt engine and refuelled our plane; then a cheery call from the pilot, and up into the high glare of sun again through a bumpy roughness at about one thousand feet, then into the calm of almost imperceptible movement at ten thousand feet, heading north.
Australia’s heart opened wider. Away to the northeast, water flashed and died slowly out where recent rain had filled a large clay-pan lying between giant sandhills that continued over the horizon.
We circled Oodnadatta and landed; then up and on again, this time high above Simpson’s Desert, tremendous, and patterned in more detail than the most delicate embroidery. There were eroded gullies and narrow ravines, odd pinnacles and small plateaux and, as we went farther north, a curious repetition of parallel ridges, low at first, but gradually more definite and prominent. Delicate detail and hazy detail merged into distance towards every horizon. It was a glorious land of colour from the air, but a land of thirst and terrible hardship for those who might try to cross its surface.
Dry watercourses, like paralysed green serpents, twisted in from the west, crossed beneath, and continued south-east towards the Lake Eyre cesspit of spent rivers.
The southern approach to Alice Springs, nine hundred and eighty-one miles north of Adelaide, is dramatic. A high red wall of rock, topped with green spinifex, bars the way. We landed at the aerodrome just before noon, four miles south of this Macdonnell Ranges wall. I had travelled 2,279 miles in thirty-six hours, which included fifteen hours’ flying time at an average of 152 miles per hour. My sleepy companion decided to come with me to put in a four-day ‘snooze’ at the Stuart Arms Hotel before continuing by air to Darwin. He had slept in the plane and now he dozed in the motor-coach and did not hear the echoing rumble as we whizzed through Heavitree Gap. We shared a room at the rambling old hotel. He remained upright for lunch, and then coiled up in a bed much too short for his long legs.