Alice Springs, NT: Aug 30

We were pleasantly surprised by Alice Springs, which is the only town of any size in the Red Centre of Oz at around 30,000. It had an interesting mix of hippies, cowboys, South Asians, and suburban-looking types. Had we been able to stay longer, we would have added on a day so that we could have gone to the rather eclectic evening market downtown and the Nocturnal Tour led by the Desert Park. But, as it was, we had a train to catch, the Ghan Train, which derives its name from the Afghan camel trains.

So we did the only thing we had planned, which was to go to the Alice Springs Desert Park. It was fabulous! We spent five hours there and didn’t have enough time to see everything. Every hour there was a different presentation or lecture regarding either the animals or the Aboriginal peoples of the area. The first we went to was a bird presentation during which they brought out various birds and had some of them fly over our heads to different perches in the outdoor theater. The birds included a kite, a falcon, a barn owl, a tawny frogmouth and a Curloo. I learned that the Frogmouth is so called because it will sit with its head back and mouth gaping. Insideits mouth something gives off light and attracts its next meal. Cool. Also, the Curloo, with which we would become only too well acquainted the next week, makes a sound like a crying baby ghost at night and incited much fear among new settlers back in the day.

 

We also saw a talk on Aboriginal women, their tools and the food they would make. Bush Tucker is traditional food taken from the bush, and it includes berries, seeds and grubs, and of course kangaroo and emu meat. She also described the tools and how they would make them in sustainable ways. For example, there is a tree that naturally grows large knobs on it. These would be removed and used as bowls, but they were not allowed to take more than one bowl from each tree, at least not until it had fully healed from the first one.

They also had passports! These were wooden shields with designs on them that would somehow communicate to a different linguistic group which group the carrier was from. Men would carry these and it would give them permission to enter another group’s territory for hunting. So cool.