A trip on the Ghan
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Alice Springswritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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Alice Springswritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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The Ghan enters Alice Springs through
a pass in the MacDonnell Ranges called Heavitree Gap. It’s a place of
geological wonder, where nature has sliced open the old rock to reveal in
cross section how the upthrusts of rock formed the Ranges. The Gap was a
place of power and magic to Aborigines. Young tribesmen could go there only
in the company of an elder. Women were not allowed there at all, but made
to walk over the range. White men had little concern for the sacred sites
of the Aborigines. They saw only a handy pass through the range, and they
built there first the road, then the
railway.
Heavitree Gap
The first white to explore Central Australia was Charles Sturt. In 1844 he set out from Adelaide to search for mythical inland sea whose existence was an article of faith in the early colonies. He reached the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert but illness and lack of water turned his expedition back. The explorer John McDouall Stuart succeeded in 1862 where Sturt had failed. Stuart was surveying a route for the proposed overland telegraph line, which was later built along his survey line and completed as far as Darwin in 1872. The telegraph put Australia in touch with the world, and was directly responsible for the creation of the city of Central Australia, Alice Springs.
The spring, an oasis in the dry centre, was an obvious site for a telegraph repeater station. Its original name was Alice’s Spring, named for the wife of the overland telegraph builder, Charles Todd. The town which developed nearby was called Stuart, and when the railway came in 1929, its terminus was still called Stuart.
Palm valley
But people preferred the name Alice Springs. The writer Neville Shute
set a popular novel there, A Town Called Alice, and the book and the
later film helped the Alice become Australia’s most famous inland
town....
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