Saturday, 05 April 2003

Land of the Flies. Notes for visitors to the Australian Outback: The first thing they don't tell you in the tourist brochures is about the flies. Millions upon millions of houseflies. They'll be trying to land in your ears and nose as soon as you step off the airplane. This is the reason why I'm wearing what looks like an oversized hair net in the photo at right; it's not a question of whether you want to look silly or not, but whether you want to look silly wearing a net on your head or look silly trying to shoo away dozens of flies all day long.

I'm told that the flies are only really a problem during the "off season," which runs from about October to the end of April; apparently the best time to visit the Northern Territory is during its winter (June to August), when daytime temperatures are merely in the 25° C (80° F) range. We were definitely ahead of the season on this trip. The flies go away at night (perhaps they have a pressing engagement elsewhere), so if you retreat to your air-conditioned hotel room during the hottest part of the day, you can enjoy a cooler and relatively fly-free tour in the early morning and late evening. Also, mercifully, there aren't any biting or stinging bugs to speak of — so the problem is limited to preserving your sanity while a team of houseflies attempts to explore your head.

On our first day in Alice Springs, we toured the visitors' centre of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which provides health care to the isolated communities of inland Australia. (Alice Springs itself has a population of only about 28,000, and this is the large city in central Oz; the town exists mainly to serve as the regional headquarters for a lot of vital services, and to support tourism. It is, as my parents noted, not much larger than the southern Illinois town they departed from.) The R.F.D.S. was the world's first aerial medical service, and it developed (through Alf Traeger) one of the more clever inventions of the 1920s: The Traeger Pedal Radio, a combination typewriter, Morse Code generator, and radio transceiver, all powered by pedaling as you typed.

Tomorrow: Australia's first telecommunications network, a.k.a. the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, and the actual "spring" for which Alice Springs is named.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 18:25 [Permalink]