Sightseeing in "The Alice"

I found some cheap internet here in Brisbane, so get ready for some updates! :)

In the last post, I was talking about hiking through The Olgas. The next day I woke up and drove back to Alice Springs.



It was a long lonely drive, but I made it back with no troubles and went straight to the Desert Park. If you've read Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country (over here it's called Down Under), he talks about the park in there.

It was a really neat park. It had three or four different areas that showed the different kinds of desert there are in Australia. The Aboriginal people managed to figure out ways to successfully live in the desert thousands of years before white men got here and started going out and dying in it. There was an audio tour that talked about how to find water - what plants will be nearby - and how the life that lives in the desert survives. There are actually quite a few living things that thrive or survive in the desert. There was an excellent nocturnal house that had many endangered species in it. One of Australia's banes is imported animals - the cat and the rabbit have done a great deal of harm to the native life. Some of the animals only live in captivity now. I had the pleasure of seeing the bilby (the audio tour told me that there have been campaigns to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby, some neat hopping mice, the echidna (the other egg-laying mammal along with the platypus), and a host of other lizards and snakes.

And I finally got to see one of these!



The enclosure for the kangaroos was fenced in, but you walked into it to see them, so you could pretty much walk right up to them if you wanted to! I guess they're pretty docile when they're well fed. The didn't really do anything but lounge around, but at least now I could say that I saw one!

After the Desert Park, I found my way to the hostel, had dinner, and stayed in for the rest of the night. I was tempted to go to a movie, but there was talk on the radio about assaults that had taken place near where I was staying (although they said there were suspects in custody) so I didn't want to take any chances.

The next day I drove around Alice and went to a variety of small museums. The first one was the School of the Air. There are about 16,000 people that live in the outback, including families on cattle farms and indigenous Australians. Instead of sending their kids to boarding schools, they are able to do distance learning. They get packets in the mail and have lessons over the internet (used to be 2 way radios). They do that until they are 13, and then they can continue distance learning with another school or go to boarding school. It was really ingenious, and apparently over 80% of the kids go on to university, although many of them return home to help run the cattle farms afterwards.

The next place I went was also uniquely Australian - the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Those 16,000 people also need medical care, so the doctors fly out to the communities and have clinics, as well as airlifting out emergencies. Each of the large cattle stations is required to have an airstrip so that the plane can land if it needs to. There are always nurses on call and a doctor can be almost anywhere in under an hour.

Just down the street from the Flying Doctors was the Pioneer Women's Museum. It was deserted, but I was right there anyway so I decided to check it out. I was really glad I did! There was a little old lady behind the counter who told me they had only recently moved into that building, which was the old jail that was about to be torn down. She also explained that the intent of the museum was to show case women who were the first to do anything, not necessarily "pioneer women". Inside the museum, there was a lot of information about both "pioneer women" (the first women in the outback), but also on pioneering women throughout Australian history. One of the things about the small museums here that really gets me is that you can imagine the people who put it all together - especially after getting the explanation about how they had just moved - I could picture the little old ladies deciding what to put into the museum. I guess all small museums are like that, but I felt it strongly here and also at the ANZAC exhibit in Sydney.

So anyway, I found the little museums quite charming. Unfortunately, I didn't have time for any more of them because it was time to go to Melbourne!