Alice Springs

The whole history of this town reflects a time when Australia was looking to its inland for prosperity. Australia today is a nation of seaside dwellers taking our inland farmers and miners fairly much for granted, accepted as part of our makeup, but really the edge of the continent is where it is at.

Not so one hundred years ago. The Australian inland was seen as a frontier of unlimited potential, with vast riches awaiting those who could conquer the challenges of its distances and open spaces. And so it was for the South Australia of the 1860s. The invention of the telegraph promised near-instant communication, where until then messages sent by mail would take months to cover the distance to England. A cable had arrived in Indonesia and the race was on between the colonies of Australia to link in to the network, and to tap the wealth that it promised. South Australia, somewhat rashly perhaps, undertook to fund and build a telegraph line across the continent in 18 months, and all this less than a decade after an explorer had finally survived a trans-continental expedition.

And so the concept of the Overland Telegraph Line was born, and with it came the concept of the repeater stations required every 200 or so kilometres along its more than 3000km length. Alice Springs would be born to fill that simple requirement for the colony of South Australia. Its ramifications for the people of Central Australia though could not have been imagined. By the time the repeater station had completed its short working lifetime, nomadic nations of Central Australia had been urbanised, Christened, Missioned, Half-Caste and ultimately stolen as the white people struggled to come to terms with their role as outsiders who would dominate this land.

Our not-so-early start had us climb Anzac Hill at the north end of town to get a feel for the layout of the land. The Macdonnell Ranges provide locally impenetrable, but broken divisions in the landscape which largely define the natural boundaries for development. The dry Todd River bed similarly defines the local recreation for the town.

Next stop was the Telegraph Station where not only did we discover the history of the telegraph, there was also a good coverage of the re-use of the buildings for dealing with the vast and growing population of children born to black mothers from white fathers.

This is the Northern Territory, and so while I stocked up on the necessities for life, the rest of the family pursued more cultural endeavours in the galleries in the Todd Mall. That consumed much of the afternoon, but all of the physical endurance and so it was time to attempt to get to the TV towers which as usual occupy pride of place on a good hill over the town. That mission was ultimately unsuccessful, but lead us to Honeymoon Gap and the John Flynn grave site to complete the day.