May 15 -- Alice Springs

Another travel day today -- left Adelaide early for Alice Springs, which is in the center of the country. Before the bus to the airport, an aborigine came to the hotel and told us a little about his culture's beliefs and challenges today. One problem I had not realized is that they do not have the capacity to disgest sugar properly. This results in weight and alcohol problems and early renal failure. The rate of aborigines on dialysis is very high. An immediate population change we saw in Alice Springs is the much higher ratio of aborigines who have not intermixed with whites.

We spent the afternoon exploring downtown Alice Springs, followed by a visit to the Royal Flying Doctors Service and the Alice Springs Telegraph office before a dinner than included kangaroo and camel. Alice Springs is clearly a tourist town. There is a Target Mall here with a food court as well as a Woolworth's mall and food court. Woolworth's here is a grocery story not the dime store of my youth. After a quick lunch, we started looking at the souvenir shops and found t-shirts for the little grandkids and a table runner I think I will use on our sideboard.

In Alice Springs, The Residency was originally a residence for
the regional governor. After the position was eliminated, it became
a hub of elite social activity. The design is historically significant.

The Royal Flying Doctors Service is quite large and covers the entire country. They provide emergency  and flying ambulance service, especially in rural and remote areas, but also tranport patients between Australian hospitals when there is a medical need. In addition, they schedule regular clinics in remote areas and provide telephone support to doctors at a distance. They have 61 aircraft, and each run includes the pilot, a nurse, and a doctor. They have been operating since the 1920s.

In the 1800s, communication time from Australia to 'Mother England' was measured in months and once the British started laying an underground cable from Java to Darwin, the need for telegraph service connecting Darwin to the rest of the country grew in importance. A Scot named John Stuart plotted and verified a route from Alice Springs to Darwin and then returned from that trip, which was a first. In less than two years, the single line telegraph was up and running. To power the facility, one building was dedicated to creating simple batteries. Since no one could predict how long each would last, battery making was a 24 hour operation. Another problem was a need for repeater stations every 250 to 300 km because the signals faded over the wires. Each repeater station received the message and then had to re-enter it for the next station. The process took 4 hours to get a message from Adelaide in the south to England, which was a huge improvement compared to months.

The facility also played a role for the 'stolen generation', children who were removed from their aboriginal parents to be brought up in the English Christian tradition. Once the telegraph was no longer needed, the buildings sort of accidentally became a school for these children.

The original telegraph office. Several other buildings are on the grounds,
including the original barracks, superintendents home, battery works, blacksmith, etc.

A crested pigeon on the telegraph museum grounds.

We went back into town for dinner and the appetizer plate included roast kangaroo (tasted like beef or robust lamb) and camel sausage, both of which were tasty. Bob, one of our fellow travelers, has had camel with his middle eastern clients, and said this must have been a young camel, that it was very tasty compared to cutting a chunk off a roasted slab. We finished dinner with an Australian-invented dessert, Pavlova. When Anna Pavlova was a big deal and danced here, a restaurant wanted to honor her and created this. It is a meringue dish, but different from any I've had before because the meringue, very light and not baked solid, is on the bottom, and is topped with whipped cream and fruit. It looked huge, but it was mostly air and went down easily.

Afterwards, we went to an open air night market, but it was a bit of a disappointment -- many of the stalls were food, and the articles for sale were not as arty as I thought they might be.