Queen of Australia’s outback

Sudha Mahalingam

Alice Springs has much in common with other frontier towns like Kalmykia, the Buddhist outpost in the Siberian steppe, Yazd, the caravanserai town in the Iranian desert, Bhuj, our very own star of the salt pans in Kutch. Despite their remote location, all these towns are magnets for travellers in search of interesting settlements in the boondocks. All these offer 360 degree horizons, starry night skies, and particulate-free air but Alice Springs offers much more — a surprisingly vibrant cultural and sporting scene for a town located on seemingly endless stretches of spinifex — a type of outback grass that clings to your clothes and footwear. 

Alice Springs may be thousands of miles from anywhere on the vast Australian continent, but that doesn’t stop hundreds of fancy cars — all retrofitted, souped up and painted over in the most flamboyant colours — vrooming against the gorgeous backdrop of Macdonnell ranges. The occasion is the annual flagship racing event called Red Centre NATS. The Harris couple live in Broome on the west coast, but make it a point to participate in the NATS event in their Volvo convertible, which they have lovingly repainted and decorated in different designs each year. “Where else do you get 400 miles of fine road without seeing a single other car?” laughs Joe. Haulers, plumbers, mechanics everyone gets to enter his or her vehicle in the race. For three days, the town is a beehive of activity and a feast for automobile lovers.

But even outside of this colourful racing event, Alice Springs has much to make the journey worthwhile. There is a lovely telegraph station built in the 19th century, now a delightful museum. It was built to provide telegraphic connectivity from Adelaide to London through a 3000-km-long telegraph cable supported by 36,000 timber poles. Alice Springs has also evolved its own brand of unique institutions such as the Royal Flying Doctor Service, run largely on voluntary donations and catering to those far-flung communities with little access to medical care. Doctors are flown in in aircraft which are equipped with ICU facilities to patients who need them. Till date, three lakh patients have benefited from this facility. Similarly, aboriginal and settler children spread over 1.3 million kilometres of scrubland in the outback receive schooling through satellite. School of the Air provides real-time classrooms for children up to 14 years, again an innovative and imaginative way to reach education to distant communities.

Alice Springs is a wildlife enthusiast’s delight. Driving through the spinifex, you can encounter every dangerous animal and venomous creature for which Australia is known. Vicious emus, feral camels, deadly dingos, dreaded taipan snakes, colourful monitor lizards and bugs of every digit and denomination, all live peaceably alongside Alice Springs’s 12,000-odd residents.