Adelaide to Alice Springs
February 10th
Adelaide was two-street country town that thought it was a city. But its feeling of dull and pretentious self-importance wasn't the only thing i didn't like about the place. There seemed to be an ugly feeling of mass psychosis in the air there, as if something really nasty was bubbling away under the surface and could emerge at any time. I didn't know what it was - and i'd never felt like hanging around long enough to find out!
It was Friday afternoon when we arrived there, almost twenty four hours after we'd left Sydney. We were due to leave again that evening and that was about the right length for a visit to Adelaide in my opinion. In the meantime, we picked up some food at the market in the centre of town and had a couple of beers in a pub across the road.
One thing they could do right in Adelaide, i thought, was make beer. This was the home of Coopers, one of Australia's best beers. The Coopers in Adelaide tasted like i remembered Coopers tasting. In those days, though, in the eastern states, it was nothing like as good as it had used to be - i guessed they must have been brewing it in other places then or something. I suppose it was a lot more popular than it had used to be, so they probably hadn't got the capacity to make enough in Adelaide. It's a beer that's fermented in the bottle, rather than artificially gassed, which is what makes it so good, but in the eastern states places in those days, it seemed like it was artificially gassed and it tasted totally different. So it was nice to have a drop of the old style Coopers - it made me remember why i used to drink so much of it!
Then, only a few hours after we'd arrived, it was time to get onto the bus and leave again. It was only about half full, which is the way you want it on a long journey like that.
- - -
I woke up as the bus came into Coober Pedy late at night. It was a totally unremarkable, dull-looking country town. It's known for its opal mining industry - and maybe a few other things as well. But, i didn't see any sign of anything that would have induced me to get off a bus there!
On the way out of town though, i saw something quite fascinating. It was further proof of my theory that humans and ants are very closely related species. The countryside all around the town was littered as far as the eye could see with what looked like giant ant hills, glowing white in the moonlight. I assumed these were the product of opal mining, but i didn't know why they couldn't fill the holes back up again when they'd finished digging. Maybe they thought the human anthills looked good. Maybe they just couldn't be bothered...
The South Australian desert was really very green! It had obviously been raining there recently. When it got light i was kind of surprised by how much vegetation there actually was. In some places it was flat as a pancake, all the way round to the horizon, which was pretty weird, as i'd only ever seen that on the ocean before. In other places there were hills.
I'm afraid i haven't got much to say about this. It was a very strange area, but it was impossible to really experience it from behind the windows of an air-conditioned bus.
Alice Springs, or Mparnte in the language of the local Arrente aboriginal people, is a weird little town. I found it very unfriendly for such a small town. Twenty four thousand people lived there, but a large proportion of them were pretty transient really. Most people were there because there was work - and most of that was in government jobs. There's big defence force establishments around the place and there's also a lot of american military there too.
We went to Hermansburg one afternoon to visit a friend of the woman we were staying with. It's an aboriginal community about 140 kilometres west of Mparnte.
Hermansburg mission was built by Lutherans, last century sometime, and the original mission buildings are still there, including the whipping tree, complete with it's ugly chains. They're nice people, christians, ey?! The place was plagued by tourists in their four wheel drives and campervans, who probably didn't have the faintest idea what they were gawking at. The place was, in reality, a concentration camp built to aid the British colonizers in their conquest of Arrente country. This mission and many dozens more were set up and administered by missionaries - whose mission was to totally destroy the culture and spirituality of the aboriginal people as a coordinated part of the drive to wipe them out completely and deliver their lands into the hands of their new rulers.
Fortunately the tide of history wasn't on their side and the aboriginal people survived. But so much damage was done to them and their land, that it could take them centuries to recover - if recovery's ever really possible.