Rumors generally grow deformed as they travel. ~ Edward Counsel
We arrived in Alice Springs on a jet plane. The airport was a modest affair with one building and a few luggage carts. We could barely breathe in the heat as we walked from the terminal to our bus. On the way to the hotel, our tour guide Mark lavished praise on us, for being the kind of travelers who would brave the Outback, not just luxuriate in the coastal cities of Australia.
All we could see outside the window was red sandy soil and scrub brush, and the occasional scruffy tree. The sky loomed large above us. It was bright blue, speckled with filmy clouds, and vast.
All we could think was the hotel must have air conditioning, right?
We reached the outskirts of town, expecting a dirt track of a frontier town, a simple crossroads in the Outback. What we saw instead was KFC, McDonalds, Target, T-shirt shops, and two indoor malls with food courts. What? It looked like a mini-U.S.
As we learned in the next few days, what we saw was a far cry from the beginnings of Alice Springs. We heard the tale of the early European settlers who set out expecting to work their civilizing magic on the primitive Outback. In the mid 1800s they planned to string it with telegraph lines and railroad tracks, and shorten the time it took for messages and goods to travel from Melbourne in the south all the way to Darwin in the north, eventually to England, and back. It turns out that they made some unfortunate assumptions, and that the Outback tamed them instead.
A set of early explorers found an area in the middle of the country surprisingly lush, and fed by an apparent underground spring. It was determined that this would be a fine place to locate the work teams that would build the telegraph line. Too bad that those explorers had visited briefly on the wettest day of all time, and that the spring had not been a spring but a puddle that was long gone by the time the settlers showed up.
I tried to imagine the settlers who finally arrived and found only scrub and red sand and no water, no spring. They must have looked at the same giant blue sky, felt the searing sun on their skin, and wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Was it really worth risking your life in this harsh climate so that other people could get their messages around faster? Three weeks, three months, really what’s the difference?
Alice might have said the same. She was the wife of an early stationmaster, and naming the settlement after her was a customary courtesy. Even without a telegraph, she’d apparently heard rumors of the hardship in the bush. She never even came to visit, they say, and may have even found her way back to England where the lifestyle was more to her liking. The name stuck even if she didn’t.
The settlers were planning to impose their ways on the locale, but the task was greater than they imagined. They were invading an ecosystem that had evolved over thousands of years, made up of the hardiest of species. Plants that asked little from their surroundings, an odd assortment of animals, and the short dark-skinned aboriginal people all managed to survive here. Darwin would have had a field day studying how they managed.
In this world, the people didn’t wear clothes. Much of the animal life was hidden under the surface of the ground, like the four-foot long slugs that were a staple of the diet. That dried-out looking vegetation yielded the necessary amount of moisture, if you knew how to get it out. And those people had developed the right skin tone and habits to survive.
The aboriginal people were judged by the colonists, in the habit of colonists everywhere, to be uneducated savages, yet they had language, art, music, social structure, and a belief system that was expressed in intricate and carefully guarded ceremonies. They’d had 50,000 years to develop what they needed to live out here, and it didn’t include telegraphs and trains.
The day we visited the original site of Alice Springs, it was only 110 degrees. Five buildings sat facing each other, each still equipped with enough artifacts to reveal its use. The office looked like the sheriff’s office in every U.S. Western you saw on TV growing up – wooden desk, small window, and the tools of the trade. In the Westerns, it was a couple of jail cells, here a wall of first generation telegraph equipment. A wagon sat in the blinding sun in front of the stable. The stationmaster’s house, plain but for the chintz curtains, looked livable enough.
A framed picture captured the culture clash. The stationmaster stands proudly, shaking hands with a visitor dressed in a jacket and tie. To the side stands an aboriginal man dressed in the starched white uniform of a house servant. He looks absurdly out of context, his eyes fixed past the camera, maybe gazing out the window at the land he belonged on. There isn’t much said about this clash. You have to dig a little to find stories of the Europeans and the aboriginal people massacring each other, since they don’t fit the usual tourist-friendly narrative, but they exist. I’m sure there were also many heart-warming stories of attempts at mutual understanding, but in the end it is clear who came out on top. Masters at adaptability, the aboriginal people seem adept at resisting the influences of the dominant culture to this day.
It wasn’t only the aboriginal people who impeded the progress the colonists had in mind. In addition to the English officials, Australia was mainly settled by European outliers. Contrary to the dominant myth, the country was not a penal colony peopled by actual hard-nosed criminals. Instead, it received the results of a lower middle class purge that cleared out an unproductive layer of English society. Their crimes were largely petty crimes, not violent ones. Shipped halfway across the world and lacking the funds to return, they settled in and made the best of it. Understandably, they doubted very much that governmental edicts were designed to benefit them.
Therefore, when it was decreed that a national rail system would be built to enhance transportation of goods throughout the country, each of the five regions dug in. They each chose a different gauge for their railway that would extend only to the regional border. When they were done there was a country three-quarters the size of the U.S., crisscrossed with railroad tracks that could not connect with one another. You can just hear them chuckling under their breath, “Okay Mate, there’s your railroad. Happy now?”
So, the colonists got what they wanted. Aboriginal people wear clothes now, though there is still plenty of space between them and the dominant culture. The telegraph line got completed, and they had their new link to the world. A national railway was eventually constructed to supplant the five regional ones.
The yearning for connection continues. Internet cafes dot every city. Our great communicator Oprah visited as one of her final acts before her decommissioning, and travel reservations are up 30%.
Our last day in Alice Springs revealed the reason for the downtown concentration of fast food and retail giants. It is whispered that outside of town sits a joint secret defense base – secret only to incurious tourists, I think – where “scientists” (read “spies”?) monitor activities in the skies. How do you keep 2000 Americans happy in the middle of the Outback? You do the same things the colonists tried to do – provide the comforts of home. Which these days happily includes air conditioning.
Walking back to our hotel from town, we crossed a broad bridge that spanned a dry riverbed, the red sandy soil dotted with spiny light green bushes and the occasional tree. We heard voices in the dusk and looked to see several groups of 8 or 10 or 12 aboriginal people sitting in a circle. Dressed in bright colors, some of them wearing U.S. sports jerseys, they sat as if planted in the soil.
Sometimes one group would call to another, conserving the energy it would take to walk all the way in between. They were engaged with one another, and seemed oblivious to the passing tourists. We felt that we were intruding, and that our curiosity put them on display when they were just following their longtime daily habits. But really, how could we look away?
Our guide told us later that evening that seeing such a different and ancient way of life was part of the privilege of visiting the Outback. Just like we couldn’t overlook the urges of the colonists, and of the forced immigrants, we had to consider those of the people who had been there all along. What rumors must have spread among them when the pale visitors with their great plans arrived? And more recently, when the construction of a giant base is begun, or a KFC arrives? We can only guess.
CBH - 03/11
