from the track

I decided to do a photo-ode to the local landscape here from the perspective of the bike track, as I felt I hadn’t been blogging much about Alice itself lately.  I went for this ride on Saturday afternoon at about 5.30 pm, when it was only 35 C; this is actually quite pleasant as long as it’s not too humid, as the effect of the wind drying your sweat is quite cooling.  (I start to struggle on a bike when it gets to 37 C.)                                                                                                         

The ride I went on is called the twelve-hour track, tho strictly speaking, I wasn’t doing the track proper as I’m not used to cycling with clicks on, and went on the lesser track round the side of the steep rocky hill, rather than the one that takes you straight up it.  It’s called the twelve-hour track because there’s a race day every year when teams of people try to do as many laps of the track as possible in twelve hours.

‘Sounds really boring!’  someone said to me.

Riding and taking photographs at the same time meant that this ride took me almost two hours, though the constant stopping and starting was probably suitable to my level of fitness at the moment.  If I’d gone with someone else, they would have gotten pretty impatient with me (most biking types are bemused by anyone gushing over the landscape, let along photographing it).  Strictly speaking, it should only take about 45 minutes to do this track tho a good person would probably take about half an hour.

The central Australian landscape has a subtle effect on you. I don’t think I initially factored it in as one of my reasons for coming here but it’s certainly become one of the reasons for staying. One of the wrenches of moving away from the place would be to leave the landscape.  Riding around the baywalk in Sydney doesn’t hold the same level of charm for me as riding on the local tracks here. 

I had a look back through my blog and I realised I was writing a lot less about Alice than I used to.  I think that may be because the novelty of Alice, the extent to which one is in rampant observer mode, wears off after a while.  You become more blasé about its charm and concerns.

I was talking with D last night and she gave an example of this, of how you can start to become worryingly numb to some of the things that happen here.  D, a social worker, found herself stepping over an Aboriginal woman lying in the entry of the main shopping centre the other day.  After she’d walked several metres, she thought, did I really just do that?  She went back and found that, as she thought, the woman was drunk and unconscious, so she put her in the recovery position and called the day patrol (which is about to be defunded…another story altogether).  D also guiltily admits to looking forward to when the ‘mob’ leave town – there’s been a lot of people in town for sorry camps and the like. It’s possible that more people have come in because Port Augusta, their more usual Xmas location, has alcohol restrictions at the moment. There’s also been lots of stabbings, murders (including of some of her clients) and rapes. At the moment, many of the local services are understaffed, including the ED, while people join the mass diaspora to the coast.  So she’s looking forward to when some of the pressure is relieved.

So if this is January, what’s February going to be like?  Weatherwise, February’s usually worse than January. According to the local rag, we've just had nineteen consecutive days where the minimum temps remained above 23 C and the mercury exceeded 37.8 C, the old 100 F. Weatherzone says (yes) that the average minimum temp for January so far has been 26.5 C, while the average maximum temp was 40.5 C. Things probably won't get better until Anzac Day, which is traditionally when public servants in the NT swapped their walker socks and shorts for trousers. 

In the olden days, I'm told that people cooled their places in Alice by hanging wet sheets against the windows and re-spraying them during the night. Spare a thought for Olive Pink, the mad, pre-feminist anthropologist sequestered in her 'hut' on Billy Goat Hill, now part of the Olive Pink Gardens, in her eighties and suffering from a perennial heart problem:

She would only accept the air-conditioner on Reg Harris's solemn promise that it was a second-hand one that had been lying about the place for some time and that it was on loan to her, not a gift. The coolness of the air-conditioner was a great blessing and it stayed with her, on loan, until, nearly ten years later, she returned it in her fury at Reg Harris having 'allowed' John Jampijinpa, a proud heathern born and bred, to be buried according to the rites of the Catholic Church.

Even with the life-saving air-conditioner, the heat became very hard for her to bear. She found that her heart tonic seemed to have 'less kick' in it. The most likely explanation is that Dr Harriet Biffin's original tonic, first prescribed in 1915, was now being prepared at the Alice Springs Hospital. They cut out the strychnine which, with the tot of brandy, had given her the kick she relied on. An angry correspondence saw the local doctors and pharmacists written off as obstructionists. She confidently expected to die at the next burst of heat, and while pursuing her gardening and political campaigns with vigour, she began to give away the last of her worldly goods and to prepare herself for the end. She liked to talk over what would happen to her body and how she could prepare for its demise.

Julie Marcus, The Indomitable Miss Pink, pp295-6. (Miss Pink died in 1975 at the age of 90.)

According to ecological pundits like Tim Flannery, Alice will eventually become unhabitable by I forget what year, 2050, maybe, because of ever-increasing heat. Perhaps I can put the blog in a time capsule so people can look back and read about what it was like to live in Alice…. there’s probably a futuristic novel in that as well.

I tried to interweave explanatory text with the photos, but Typepad wouldn't let me do this, probably because I uploaded the photos first, so I've just given up, rather than fiddle any further.  So maybe you could imagine the gushily sentimental soaring strains of Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending from the end of the Vikram Seth: An Equal Music CD playing in the background instead, as it's part of my driving music repertoire that I associate with this landscape.

Comments

[Pavlov's Cat]

My late lamented Ma, when we were babies on a farm where the red dust blew the squillion kilometres straight down from the Centre every time there was a hot northerly, was wont in a heatwave to hang up sopping-wet sheets between our cots and the pedestal fan. Given the number of hideous accidents lurking in that scenario (and it was the 1950s, house plumbed to rainwater tank only, generator electricity only, isolated farmhouse where no-one could hear you scream, etc), it's really quite remarkable that my sisters and I have lived to tell the tale.

Wonderful photos. I love the subtlety of that landscape. The ghost cars are very sinister: shades of The Cars That Ate Paris.

And a great story of the redoubtable Olive Pink. Can there be anyone else whose name consists of two colours? (Actually I've thought of one already -- Lavender Brown in Harry Potter. D'oh.)

[Zoe]

I put my three year old to bed last night with a wrung-out damp muslin on top of him - in Canberra.

A beautiful post. I've only spent a very little time in the Centre, but that palette of colours hasn't left me.

[Jean]

Oh thanks! I've never really seen this. Not at all how I thought. Greener.

[elsewhere]

Thanks...glad to know the wet muslin tradition is still going. And yes, Jean, it is green (terrible rhyme), but the degree of greenness changes with the light -- i.e. it's much greener after it rains or at the end of the day. But as you can see from some of the photos, the ground coverage isn't complete -- i.e. the grass and shrubs are pretty tussocky. Strictly speaking, we're in the arid zone rather than the desert. As you get closer to the Simpson desert, things get a lot more stark -- the soil is very orange (i.e. 'red') tho there's still a sparse ground coverage of rather burnt looking plants. From the plane, this looks like the remnants of last night's spag bol on the bottom of the pan.

[Morgan]

Sigh...

I'll be in Alice for the second time at the end of next week, and the pictures make me look forward to it...

[elsewhere]

Great...

[jen]

long shadows are delicious I think.

I've come back here via Tiley

The orange thing - last time in Sydney I photographed bjillions of doorways, this year it was countless closeups of the harbour bridge (a truly awe inspiring structure1) and a heritage listed hotel at Genolen called Caves House

- almost no friends and family in sight. I enjoyed the orange thing - a colour guide to Australia.

Very pleased to meet you.

[elsewhere]

Thanks...I will visit your blog if you have a link...

[Evan Chamberlain]

Hi There,

I am currently in preproduction for a new Travel Series on TG4, Ireland's National TV Station. The new series will feature the Award Winning travel presenter, Hector O hEochagáin making his way around Australia on the Full Circle route from Darwin to Darwin.

He’s been on the beat with the NYPD in New York City, roamed the streets of Amsterdam looking for love, taken an undercover tour of Bolivia’s most notorious prison, been on stage with the Ladyboys in Bangkok, trained with the Foreign Legion in French Guyana, sang Irish songs with the Indians of the Amazon in Brazil, got his kit off with the world-famous Chippendales in the Rio in Vegas, run with the bulls in Pamplona, ridden with the cowboys in Nashville, and had a chinwag with Hugh Hefner and the Playboy bunnies at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills … The list goes on and on ...
Most recently he has taken the Epic Trip overland in Africa from Cairo to Cape Town.

He has One Continent left to explore and in 2006 that is his goal !

So Australia here we come ....

Hector's journey will take him from his beginning at the Summit of Ayers Rock Northwards through the Outback to Darwin, Eastwards across Northern Queensland to Cairns and then South along the Gold Coast to Sydney and then further South to Melbourne taking a quick trip to Tasmania before embarking on the trip Westwards through Adelaide and Coober Pedy to Perth before taking to the North again as he speeds up the West Coast through Broome to return to Darwin hopefully in one piece !

At this moment in time we would hope to be heading off for Australia in early April 2006 making our way to Sydney about 3/4 weeks later .. We would then return to Ireland .. and return in Mid May for another 4 weeks to conclude the project ...

The programme is shot using a digital camcorder, no bigger that an ordinary Hi 8 camera. There is no extraneous sound or lighting equipment. The whole operation is of necessity very compact. With a crew of 3 (which includes Hector) and the camera as the sole piece of equipment we will be of little distraction.

We tend to base our filming for about 4 days in each region.

This is an 8 part series of half hour programmes to be broadcast in Autumn 2006.

The Programme Layout will look like this :

Programme 1. Begin at Ayer's Rock, Alice Springs and Northward to Darwin
Programme 2. Darwin across Northen Queensland to Cairns
Programme 3. Cairns to Brisbane and down the Gold Coast.
Programme 4. Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne.
Programme 5. Tasmania to Adelaide
Programme 6. Coober Pedy to Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie.
Programme 7. Perth to Port Headland and the West Coast
Programme 8. The Final Trek through Broome and back to Darwin.

I am looking for pretty off beat stories ... however I would be interested to hear from you what are the obvious areas of interest ie. Indigenous Stories, Customs, Interesting Activiites, Festivals at this time, Unusual experiences and people .... I want to keep out of the capital cities this time unlike what I have done in Asia and South America where I spent my time walking the streets and getting into the food and the people in that way .. This time just as in Africa, I hope to be on the move as though Hector is moving through the country by Jeep or other form of Transport and experiencing the people through meeting them in their natural home setting ... Well that's the aim anyway ...

We are looking for mad stories, unusual people to interview, weird things, interesting, off track, wacky stories etc ...... anything that would be really mad television viewing. We will be doing the normal stuff aswell but it is the other content that really makes the programme what it is.

I will be looking for a guide and transport also on each of the legs of the journey but that is another days work. If this is something you offer please let me know.

Any ideas would be most welcome ... The Irish people have had a long and very fruitful relationship with Australia and so this series I'm sure will be very poular.

Kindest Regards,

Evan.

Evan Chamberlain,

Producer / Director,

Good Company Productions Ltd.

Tullamore, Co.Offaly, Ireland.

Tel / Fax ++ 353 506 60681
Mobile ++ 353 86 8338628
Email goodcompany@eircom.net
Web www.tg4.ie