Thursday, 22 April 2004

Go Ask Alice. The mud puddle at right is the so-called "spring" for which the town of Alice Springs is named. It isn't really a spring: It's just a place where the underground water table happens to be close to the surface. When the surveyors came through this part of Australia in 1871, looking for water sources and a suitable path for the telegraph line, it had rained the previous day and the water level was higher than usual—so the surveyors thought they had discovered an oasis, and they named it after the boss's wife. I think that was the last time it rained here, too.

Here we see Ye Olde Telegraph Station. These buildings were constructed between 1872 and 1905ish, and have been restored to their original condition. The people who lived here were the only whites in the area (at first), and the telegraph line through Alice Springs was Australia's first connection to the outside world, running from Adelaide to Darwin and then from there to Java by undersea cable. The telegraph brought news from Great Britain in a matter of hours, where it had taken two months to arrive by sea.

The first crew to live at the station included a stationmaster, four telegraph operators, a cook, a blacksmith (who was really a jack of all trades), their wives and children, and a teacher/governess. The station was in operation 24/7 and the operators took six-hour shifts. The station also supported two linesmen, but the linesmen didn't live at the station: They each lived 150km up or down the line, and rode out to repair it as needed. When they did return to the station about once a month for supplies, they lived in tents like these. The station itself was re-supplied once a year ("imagine going a year between shopping trips," said our guide), and was largely self-sufficient.

There were seven stationmasters here between 1872 and 1932, when the station moved to the township of Stuart—which promptly decided it liked the name Alice Springs better than it liked Stuart, and so the town renamed itself after the telegraph station. Being a stationmaster was a high-risk profession; something like four of the seven died in office or soon afterwards. At least one of the stationmasters is buried in a small cemetery on the premises.

This was also a first for me: After three years of living in Australia, I've finally seen a wild kangaroo. (How many deer and buffalo do you see on a regular basis?) The small blurry blotch in the middle of this photo is an inland wallaroo, M. robustus erubescens, also known as a "euro." If you look really closely, you may be able to see the baby kangaroo (a "joey") in her pouch.

We also had the pleasure of eating kangaroo (and emu, crocodile, and camel, for good measure) at one of Alice Springs's local restaurants. Kangaroo is in the "tastes like beef" category; I had actually eaten it before—it can be found on some menus in Sydney—but it was a first for my parents. Emu tastes like ostrich, which tastes like beef, and is pretty good. Camel tastes like beef, but has a sort of squishy, slimy texture (it was our least favorite of the four), and crocodile tastes sort of but not quite like chicken.

The next morning we got up painfully early and took a hot-air balloon ride, which I had never done before. This was probably the best way to see kangaroos in the wild; kangaroos are nocturnal animals, so they were hopping off to bed as we were getting up and inflating our balloon. We saw a few stragglers, but they were even further away than the wallaroo above and the photos didn't really turn out well. (Sorry.)

Next: Ayers Rock and the "Sounds of Silence:" Dinner by starlight in the Outback.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Administrivia. Blogroll updates, RSS feed changes, search engines and more. I've more or less raided the blogroll of (Southern Cross) Words and "borrowed" (ahem) several of his links: Yet another American in Oz, an Aussie in Paris, an expat group blog, and an exciting collection of authentic Aussie blogs.

I discovered Kevin Drum's blog (formerly known as CalPundit) when he became the in-house blogger for Washington Monthly magazine, and since then he's become an indispensable voice of reason from the middle. I've also updated my link to Howard Bashman's How Appealing, since he's now become the in-house blogger for Legal Affairs magazine. (Hmmm. I'm still waiting for the phone call from Highlights for Children inviting me to write their in-house blog, but until then….)

Another new link goes to the Australian chapter of Democrats Abroad, which is on the verge of becoming a real live organization down here. Greg has already blogged about yesterday's meetup, so I'll just say in passing that I've never been this politically active either. (Well, not since college, anyhow. And that was an accident.) Until this election cycle, voting was the full extent of my political activity — but between Howard Dean and the slow-motion train wreck called the Bush administration, I've gotten my act together and started getting involved.

Syndication-wise, you may have noticed that I've switched back to including the full content of the article in my RSS feeds, instead of just the first sentence. As the newsfeed-readers get more sophisticated, they're starting to act more like web browsers than clipping services — so it probably makes less sense than it did a year ago to serve up only part of the article. I've also retired the blog's Tech category and RSS feed; after 18 months of blogging I apparently have very little to say about technology. Or, at least, I have a lot more to say about travel and politics.

And, finally, the search engine that quietly appeared in the sidebar two or three weeks ago is available for your browsing pleasure; if you want to find everything I've written about Ayers Rock, now you can. (It only shows the most recent six articles, though, so you may not be able to dig up everything I've ever written about Iraq or George Bush in one pass.) Enjoy!

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 4:52 am. comments.

Thursday, 22 April 2004

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 4:43 am. comments.