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.