G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 16. Thanks for joining me in my little letter writing campaign and giving me a reason to write my version of what-I-did-on-summer-vacation.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up and reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time featuring my journal entries written during the trip. You’ll see the journal entries highlighted in the letter.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other 15 letters here. They go well accompanied with a hot serving of fish and chips.
I’ve just had a week off to do who knows what, but it did allow me to spend some extra time putting this week’s letter together for you. Without further ado…
Luke
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle. - Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland
To enter Alice Springs, you have to travel through an enormous gap in some steep, red mountains. It’s like you’re entering into some sort of lost world, or maybe Mordor, though without the giant volcano and evil empire and orcs on the other side.
The arrival experience of coming through the Heavitree Gap and then emerging into town is appropriate, I think, because Alice Springs is a different place. I’ve not been anywhere like it during my travels in Australia. It’s number 51 on the list the largest cities in Australia in terms of population, but is far more than 50 ticks different from the big, cosmopolitan coastal cities like Melbourne and Sydney, or even the larger regional and country towns that precede Alice Springs on the list.
For the first 60 or so years of its existence, Alice Springs was known as Stuart, named after our old friend John McDouall Stuart, the first man to traverse Australia from south to north and back again. I told you all about him in letter #10, which I called Beyond Thunderdome: Escape from Coober Pedy. In 1933 the town was given the name Alice Springs, and most people just shorten it to ‘Alice’.
So what makes it so different? First, the town is surrounded by desert. The red sands of the Simpson Desert lie to the east, and the Tanami Desert to the north and west. The southern boundary of the town is made up of the red mountains of Tjoritja, the MacDonnell Ranges. In that regard, Alice reminds me a bit of the towns in the southwest of the U.S., places like Tucson, Arizona where the city is defined around the mountains and desert and dry arroyos.
The city sits on the banks of the Todd River, which is a river mostly in name, as it sits dry 95% of the year. But the fresh water springs along the Todd are why Alice exists in the first place. Because of the availability of fresh water, Alice initially came together as a settlement to service one of the repeater stations of the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL), one of the greatest achievements of Australian engineering that ultimately helped to connect this far flung island to the rest of the world. Sir Charles Todd dreamed up the OTL and made it a reality. Sir Charles’ wife was named Alice. She got the town, he got the dry river.
The people also make Alice a different place. 30% of the population of the Northern Territory, where Alice Springs is located, are Indigenous peoples. Walk the streets of Melbourne or Sydney or any of the largest cities in Australia and you could be anywhere in Europe or North America. The vast majority of the people in those cities are white, and most diversity is made up of people of Asian descent, coming from places like China, Malaysia, or India. Not so in Alice. First time there it felt strange, both more Australian and decidedly not Australian, all at the same time.
We were driving into Alice from the south, however we didn’t make it through the Gap at first. We stopped short, opting to stay at a caravan park on the outskirts, a part of town also home to the sewage treatment plant, a business of questionable usefulness in the desert called Alice Springs Sand Supply, and the horse track where annual camel races are held. There was also a brewery within walking distance, and a food truck called Captain Tennant Gourmet Food that’s permanently set up on site at the caravan park.
21 October 2019, Alice Springs
Eating fish and chips from a van in the trailer park. The fish and chips man told us his story, and it was a long tale of woe. He moved to Tennant Creek to prospect for gold, and turns out that his metal detector - did he call it a coil? - couldn’t detect metal. His fish and chips van should have cost $40k but he spent $60k, he blew out his knee and paid $400 for a shot in his other knee of some Canadian serum that was made from turkey waddle (surprisingly, it did nothing). Workers Comp claims in there somewhere.
The caravan park owner brought in a waffle truck man whose customers sat at Captain Tennant’s tables and used his chairs. The extra help girl he brought in didn’t know what she was doing, and when he told her to leave she grabbed money from the till and he had a wrestling match with her in front of customers.
To top it all off, all he wants to do after a hard day of schlepping fish and chips is to have a quiet drink downtown at the Hilton, but when he’s there he always gets bothered by panhandlers.
We felt sorry for him so said his food was good - it wasn’t - and helped him stack up his chairs before saying goodbye.
I wonder what’s been going well with the guy?
22 October 2019, Alice
We’re here and we’re resetting. The boys are doing nothing - spent all day getting sunburnt at the pool - and Katie and I drove all over Alice running errands. Oil change appointment, picking up spare wheel bearings, a preliminary ($200) grocery run, alcohol. Stuff to get us ready for the next stage, probably 2 weeks in the deep nowhere of desert in west NT and east WA. It’ll not be harsh or dangerous - I hope - but it will be an adventure, and definitely remote as hell.
Both Henry and Oscar took a liking to wandering the caravan park. It was quite empty at the end of October, as not many right minded people visit this part of Australia on the cusp of summer, when temperatures averaged out at nearly 33C (91F). So the pool was quiet, the toilet blocks weren’t being defiled daily by throngs of people, and the large open-air kitchens were clean and empty.
One morning, Oscar was cooking himself a bagel in the kitchen, and as you’d know if you are a bagel person, they are often too fat for average toasters and end up getting stuck. Oscar came up against the fat bagel issue, and after trying to vigorously shake the toaster to no avail, he opted instead to use the most obvious tool at hand: the butter knife.
Oscar still speaks of this memory fondly, and don’t we all have similar fond memories of when we were kids and learning about electricity? I certainly do. I can remember very vividly that time a hair dryer slid into the bathtub I was occupying. In retrospect, it’s quite suspicious that a hairdryer was perched precariously on the edge of the tub, but I digress.
Oscar balanced the dangers of the kitchen toasters and the tall water slide at the pool with reading, lots of reading. He had taken to keeping books he had finished in the car, on the floor in front of his seat. Oscar was not a big kid at the time, but at this point in the trip his little space in the car was starting to get a bit awkward.
Oscar finished another book today. It is called 53 Shades of Brown or something. I think that puts him at 5 since the start of the trip? Keeping him in books is like trying to outrun a tornado.
As I mentioned, Alice is different in more than just location. It’s quite striking at first, coming from the rest of Australia, and this is me trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of the differences.
Out here in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark. We have to carry lights around with us in the form of headlamps. Headband lights, as they call them here, modelled after the old miners lights that they wore on their helmets, are lights that you strap to your head that illuminate whatever you’re looking at. The one I have has a couple different light settings - two different brightnesses, and a red light. The red one allows you to see things without blinding the people around you by pointing a light directly in their face, and to not attract a swarm of light-hungry bugs. In the middle of nowhere, there are lots of bugs. One thing it also does is make everything look red. Ok, duh. But if you have a blue cup, it’ll look red. Your favorite green shirt? Red. Everything is red, like you’re in a submarine or something.
I think this is an interesting way to approach where we’re at right now. We are in the “Red Centre”, but that’s not what I mean. The areas where we’ve been travelling have a much higher percentage of Indigenous Australians than Melbourne does. It’s dead obvious that the Indigenous are different from white folks like us from Iowa and Europe and pretty much everyone that isn’t indigenous to Australia, which is most people. But I hate to look at someone and let my eyes lead the brain. Their skin is really dark. Their hair is too. They wear different clothes, their bodies and faces are shaped differently. Different in many ways, yet under the red light, they are people, just like us. With little kids to take care of, just like us. With potential and problems, just like us.
Don’t get me wrong; equating ourselves and all the privilege and luck and opportunities we’ve had with an Indigenous person is naive. But to start from a point where under the red light of the headlamp we’re all pretty much the same, I think is a good start.
Since the beginning of our trip, we’d been travelling north for over three thousand kilometres, and once we left Alice, it would be time to head west on the Tanami Track, a 1,000 km unpaved and unruly route that cut across the desert to the Kimberley in northwest Australia. It would be more remote than we’d been at any other time on the trip. More remote than the Oodnadatta Track, more remote than Palm Valley. In the middle of the Tanami, you’re hundreds of kilometres from anything, if you don’t count the massive gold mine that’s somewhere out there, surrounded by a high barbed wire fence.
Where there’s risk and the unknown, one must plan.
Fuel on the Tanami
Full tank at Yuendemu
308k Yuendemu to Rabbit Flat, 155k Rabbit to Billiluna, 171k Billiluna to Halls Creek, 46k Wolfe Creek side trip
Total: 680k
Alice to Mount Doreen ruins: 348k, Mount Doreen to Wolfe Creek: 597k
Fuel is available at the following locations:
BillilunaMonday - Friday 8.30 - 11.00 am & 2.00 - 4.00 pm, Saturday 8.00 - 10.30 am., Sunday CLOSED
Contact number: 08 9168 8076
Balgo
Monday - Friday 8.00 - 12.00 pm & 2.00 - 5.00 pm, Sat & Sun 8.00 - 12.00 Noon
Contact number: 08 9168 894
Yuendemu
Monday - Friday 8.00 am - 6.00 pm, Saturday & Sunday 9.00 am - 6.00 pm
Fuel also available at Tilmouth Well, similar times to Yuendemu.
On my first visit to Alice back in the summer of 2003, Katie and I went to the hospital. It’s not a place on the normal tourist circuit, and any opportunity to get off the beaten track is a good one, though this trip to the hospital was not optional. It was after an episode I’d had inside the supermarket near Uluru, one I mentioned in Letter #11. I had a gastrointestinal issue picked up in a dirty hostel in Cairns, and by the time we’d spent a night at Uluru, I was so sick and feverish that I’d had to sprint shivering out the door of the air conditioned supermarket and lie on a bench in the desert sun.
We cut short our stay at Uluru so Katie could drive to Alice Springs and take me to a doctor, and the best option ended up being the Alice Springs Hospital. I slept most of the 5 hour drive back to Alice, though through my fever dreams I seem to remember that the song “Gay Bar” by the band Electric Six kept playing on the radio.
The Alice Springs Hospital is not flash, in fact, a doctor in New Zealand laughed at me a week later when I told him that I’d gone there during the depths of my illness. Just the fact, though, that Alice has a hospital is one of the things that makes it the centre of the region.
And being the centre of things means that Alice is home to many creature comforts and modern essentials, like a shop to buy a $140 dongle for your computer, a restaurant called Loco Burrito, and a coffee roaster. And of course there’s the aforementioned brewery, the Alice Springs Brewing Co. All things appreciated. Equally essential, however, were the numerous car repair shops. 3,300 hot kilometres into our trip, and I thought that an oil change would be sensible.
23 October 2019 - Alice
Whirlwind of running around running errands to all sorts of shops downtown. I noticed that the most prominent buildings downtown are the giant and fancy courthouse, and the cop shop, which had about eight paddy wagons parked outside by the curb. Never a good sign.
Got an oil change first thing at a place called Autocorrect, run by Pierre and Mark. After putting our Prado up on the lift, I heard them out in the shop saying ‘Oh, this one’s buggered too!’ while wandering from wheel to wheel. The question passed my mind as to whether they were doing the whole thing as some sort of rehearsed show, to dupe the dupable passer through who just wanted a simple oil change, into some expensive repairs. Then Mark showed me the bushings on my suspension. Whatever they are. The ones on the front were indeed buggered, the ones on the back cracking, probably not long for this world and would soon be moving on to that unsealed road in the sky. Buggered bushings, surely that’s not a good thing?
But despite my concern, they just let me know, and didn’t try to push me to fix things or else, didn’t try to spin tales of woe where the family and I were stranded on the side of the road with only a loaf of bread and bag of taco chips. Then I asked about suspension, and told them that we’re pulling a trailer and when hitched to the car it sags in the back. The springs and shocks are original parts, they told me, circa 2003, and are probably worn out. They gave me a price to fix the lot.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the office and my oil is being changed, and watching as a small mouse runs around underneath the counter. I could hear Pierre, a South African, adeptly handling concerns and complaints from other guys in the shop and even those who walked in the door by saying ‘Maybe we need to have a meeting about that?’.
In the end, I liked Pierre and Mark and was feeling car-vulnerable, seeing as how we were about to set off across the desert on the Tanami Track. So I agreed to have the bushings and shocks replaced. This would mean staying in Alice for an additional day.
Our stop in Alice provided time to think. Multiple days in one relatively comfortable spot - we were still sleeping in a tent, mind you - allowed the mind to wander and then focus on more than just what the next day would bring. This was real life intruding on our life as travelling vagabonds. When you are on the road, your day–to-day existence is quite different from that of normal people who follow a civilised path of work and school, break for the weekend, then do it all over again the following. On the road, you are focused on this day - things like whether we want to get up early enough for some bushwalking, and if so who’s going to volunteer to be at the head of the line to scare away any king brown snakes from the path? How far to the next petrol station? Do we have enough milk for breakfast, canned beer for dinner?
My head wandered eight weeks ahead to January when our trip would end, and the fact that I would need to find a job. I’d quit my previous gig at the start of our year abroad. It had been a perfectly respectable and well paying job in project management, but one that I had no interest in returning to. Katie didn’t have such worries because she had left her job on a leave of absence, so would return in January and pick up where she left off. While this definitely provided both of us some comfort that we’d not be completely destitute upon our return to Melbourne, that comfort only went so far, especially when I did not know what exactly it was that I wanted to do.
Henry and Oscar were a bit old to need a stay-at-home dad. Being a gentleman farmer had some appeal, but being a farmer in inner-city Melbourne presents some rather obvious challenges. Plus I don’t enjoy gardening because I’ve always felt guilty about dumping water on the ground in the hopes that something will happen.
I had all this in mind when a job opportunity came popped up from who knows where at this point, an opportunity to work on the marketing side of one of the largest and most prestigious architects in Melbourne, one called Fender Katsalidis.
24 October 2019, Alice
Job application to Fender Katsalidis. I don’t know if I’ve ever done one where I put in more thought and effort. They’ll either be like, ‘WTF is this old dude doing applying for an entry level gig with all this bullshit?’, or ‘Wow, he’s the one’. Cue the music.
Applications close Monday. The pessimist in me thinks that they’re surely picturing something other than me In their head, probably a 28 year old who’s good on the socials and can tweet like a muthafucka and will happily add clip art to tenders, all day long. The optimist says I fucking nailed it and they can’t not call me back. We will see.
More real life intruded when I had a phone call from Dan, a friend of mine in Melbourne. I met Dan during business school, and he had worked for a long time in one of Australia’s big four banks. My understanding of working for big corporates is that a person’s experience can be boiled down into one of three conditions: either you’re climbing the ladder, you’re comfortable, or you’re getting screwed by either the company or your co-workers. Or both. There are also combinations of the above, such as when you’re cruising comfortably along but meanwhile Ric from accounting is bitching to the boss about how you turn in your expense reports late.
Anyways, Dan had been climbing for a while in the bank and was happy, but the last time I had spoken to him, several months ago, he had stopped climbing and had started getting screwed. When he called, he reported that he’d grown tired of it so had quit and was starting an electric bike subscription business with his brother, and was working out of the back of a bike shop.
It seemed like a bit of a furphy to me, a folly, maybe a midlife crisis. But Dan seemed happy and excited, so I was happy and excited for him. I was living out my midlife crisis in a caravan park in Alice Springs, so who was I to judge? But speaking with Dan did give me hope that maybe I could have a bit of a folly of my own when I returned to Melbourne?
Oscar downed two more books today. The Hunger Games and Dogsong. I picked up the Hunger Games for him yesterday morning.
By the end of our fourth day in Alice, Pierre and Mark had finished up the work on our Prado. They dropped it off at the caravan park riding high and looking meaner with its brand new suspension.
There’s a local saying in Alice that if you see the Todd River flow, you’ll come back to Alice Springs. And another that says if you see the Todd flow three times, you’ll never leave. The Todd was bone dry during our stay. Our car was back to us in good repair. We were well rested and growing soft from trips to the brewery and swimming pool. It was time to cross the desert.