Alice - where the hell is Alice!
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Fri 26 Nov 2010 22:38
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Thursday 2105 Local 1135 UTC
12:27.07S 130:49.39E
Rush, rush, rush. Here I am sitting in Darwin
aboard Rhiann Marie planning our passage to Indonesia tomorrow. It's hard to
believe that I woke up this morning on the sand bank of a dried out river bed in
the Red Centre of the Australian Outback! No, nothing to do with excess alcohol
or another Kava experience.
I will tell you.....
We arrived in Alice Springs, known simply as
Alice, on Monday at 1600 and were met by our 4x4 hirer. We did the
paperwork, and loaded up the billies and swags and such like and headed off to
load up with a few provisions before charging off south into the Red Centre of
Australia.
Our plan was to head south along the Stuart
Highway finding somewhere to stay then cut off on an off road track for 150km
towards Uluru (Ayers Rock) before picking up the highway again for another
couple of hundred kilometres. We would then continue past Uluru to Kata Tutja
(The Olgas) and return to Uluru to see the sun set.
We thought we would then camp at the camp site
there before moving on the next day to Kings Canyon walking that then working
our way back towards Alice finding somewhere to camp along the way.
Swags. Ever heard off them? Nothing to do with
tails or curtains, just a thin "mattress" inside a canvas bivouac bag. The
kind of thing you would see rolled up on the back of a stock man's or swagman's
horse. No tent required.
The first night we stayed in a small cabin
at "roadhouse" called Stuarts Well, about 100k's down the highway from
Alice. There we met Jim Cotterill who together with his father and brother had
opened up the track to Kings Canyon in the sixties - literally chopping his
way through the outback to build a rough track to open up the incredible
canyon to tourists. Now, Jim was interesting and had some good stories, but not
half as interesting as Dinky his Dingo who played the piano and sang! I kid you
not. This dingo was rescued and rehabilitated by Jim and was quite a
performer! Stuarts Well was a great wee stop and full of
characters.
The next day we covered the 350 - 400 k's to Kata
Tutja and Uluru - half on road and half off road. They were both staggering
sites of natural beauty and wonder. It is no wonder that the indigeneous people
considered them sacred sites. We visited another aboriginal cultural centre but
still no sign of aboriginal people working at "their" places.
Not liking the designated "campsite" at Uluru, that
night we droveabout 100km away from Uluru and then over rough terrain off
road scaring off wild horses in the process, and found a site to throw our
swags down and pitch camp. We collected firewood and got a fire going
before cooking dinner and settling down for the night. I kept the fire going all
night to keep the Dingoes, horses and snakes away from our camp.
It was magnificent sleeping in a "5 million
star hotel" with an almost full moon coming up after a few hours pitch darkness.
Breakfast was a swagman's breakfast of beans, sausage and egg
before packing up camp and heading on again. This brought back
memories of camping in our younger days for Trish and I. I've lost the
touch though, the fire was a two match
effort!
After another couple of hundred kilometers of rough
road and track driving we reached a working 800,000 acre "station" (farm). We
called in for tea and while inside read the story of the proprieters, Ian and
Lyn Conway we then asked the daughter Sally to play us a film of an
advertised documentary of their story.
It was early morning and there we were
watching a highly moving and emotional documentary of how this man had been
brought up as the white son of an Aboriginal mother. Orphaned and abandoned. In
and out of schools and periodically removed by the authorities from his
aboriginal family.
Having worked hard to succeed in life Ian and Lyn
deperately wanted to help the children of an aboriginal settlement a further 70
km into the wilderness. The governement were doing nothing for them. Children
were starving, poverty, apathy and hopelessness reigned in the
small settlement. The film did not say so but I suspect the community was
also suffering from the problems of alcohol and child abuse and associated
violence which appear to be endemic in many of the indigenous
communities.
With the blessing and support of their families Ian
and Lyn put everything they had into getting six of the children educated
in a boarding school in Adelaide, over a thousand miles away, while
insisting that the children must be proud of their roots and their culture. It
was a very moving story and helped us understand a little more of the nature of
the problem the indigenous population of Australia suffer. Australia is a
rich country. There should not be children starving and uneducated - but there
are. They were desperately trying to raise money to help more of the children. A
government note at the end of the short film said something to the effect of
"the government was aware of the program and hoped the community would
appreciate and support the Conway family efforts". This - only this
statement, no cash to help, when Australia is awash in valuable minerals and
resources. It infuriates Ian Conway and it raised my hackles too.
It is this kind of story that makes my blood boil
about governments. With so much waste and inefficiency there is often no money
left for those that really do need it. I once stated at a board meeting of a
quango to which I was appointed and foolishly thought I could change or
influence, that as far as I was concerned wasting public money was not much
different to robbing a bank (where you take what is not your own and do
with it as you will). Needless to say after a muffled giggle from some who
thought I was joking I was met with blank expressions of incomprehension.
You see, every penny of public money spent where it is not NEEDED is a penny
deprived from those who do NEED it. Not want.
Need.
Any civilised country should be able to provided
the highest standards possible of compassionate care for those that cannot help
themselves - the needy. Not the greedy, the lazy, the inefficient, the
ineffective or the unneccessary. In the case of those poverty stricken
uneducated children in Australia, a private individual was stepping in to
do what a government should be doing. We see the same stary in the UK too
often........
Calm, calm, breath
........ where were we?
Ah yes, onwards to Kings Canyon. The
stunning and somewhat mysterious canyon was tackled at almost the height of
the day. Temperatures were approaching 40 deg C. The walk to the top of the
canyon was a three hour walk and was dramatic. People regularly die from heat
exhaustion and heart attacks on this walk, but we didn't.
Later we had to make another 200 kilometers of
rough track before coming to an extremely rough barely passable 20km section of
"track" which took us through many river crossings and over flat rock and
boulders. This was the sometimes very difficult to identify route upto Palm
Valley.
Palm Valley was as beautiful as it sounds. A
"garden of eden" type place hundreds of kilometers from anywhere. It was
breathtaking. We pitched camp along the sandy shore of the semi dried river bed.
Our swags were on the ground under the open starry moonlit sky again and a good
campfire was lit before darkness fell at 1930.
On the trip we saw wild Dingoes, (as well
as a piano playing one), wild horses and camels freely roaming the outback.
Kangaroos and Wallabies were also regularly bouncing in and out of the
picture. We were pleased however not to encounter any snakes where we lay
our swags. Perhaps the fire helped.
In any event it was a memorable few days, sailing
through the outback as opposed to the oceans for a
change.
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