Two towns called Alice Springs

This essay by former Centralian Advocate editor Glen Morrison won the 2010 Charles University Essay award in the NT Literary Awards.

“The Alice” (as the town … is affectionately known), is … the gateway to Australia’s heart and soul. You can hear the ‘heartbeats’ as you visit Uluru (Ayers Rock), take an Aboriginal culture tour, or glide over the spectacular red plains in a hot air balloon. Just take a moment and you’ll feel the ancient beat.” : Website of Australian Tourism Net

“Alice Springs is in meltdown, its escalating social unrest and entrenched dysfunction on display for international tourists to see in the middle of the town’s mall. The safety warnings on backpacker forums are becoming increasingly hysterical; letters published in the town’s local newspaper beg for authorities to restore order. T-shirts are on sale with a slogan that is no joke: Alice Springs –Stabbing Capital of the World.”: Natasha Robinson, writing for The Australian, December 2008

More than nine years ago I left family new-year celebrations in New South Wales and dragged my soon-to-be wife on a three-day drive across western Queensland through 40-plus temperatures and into the Northern Territory. With as many of our worldly possessions as we could cram aboard, a well-worn copy of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and no serviceable air-conditioning, we steered for Alice Springs, where I was to take up a position as news reporter with the twice weekly Centralian Advocate. Ultimately I would become the newspaper’s editor. Back then it was all just part of a plan to escape the rat race.

My fiancé didn’t have a job to start when we arrived, nor did I have that much experience in journalism, but we’d heard that wouldn’t be a problem – jobs were easy to come by in Alice. The plan was a full-time writing gig and regular pay packet for me, and a chance for her to try something different, then on to greener pastures. Short and sweet.

But, as it does for so many newcomers, Alice Springs had something else in mind. And, as we drove on through the January heat and turned left onto the Stuart Highway at Three Ways just north of Tennant Creek, we had no inkling of just how quickly we would fall in love with the place – despite its troubles – nor how long that lover’s embrace might last.

Now, after almost a decade here, friends and family still struggle to understand why it is we choose to live in such a harsh and remote place, plagued by poverty and violence, and so far to the west of the Great Divide. A clear explanation is not always easy to give.

Australians by and large cling to the east coast. For most of us, the Outback – the land of droughts and flooding rains covering most of our island continent – might as well be a parallel universe. And, although we are willing to embrace the outback tradition in a cultural sense, we seem to be in the grip of a sort of geographic agoraphobia when it comes to contemplating an actual life in remote Australia. For those who do venture inward to their country’s interior, Alice Springs – once dubbed Australia’s Outback capital – reveals itself to be two towns, at least on the surface.

The first Alice Springs is a go-ahead tourism mecca, a potential mining hub populated by enterprising go-getters, pastoralists, business opportunists, a veritable army of social workers, anthropologists and health workers, and adventurers after something different from their lives.

The other Alice Springs is an Aboriginal ghetto, a welfare and alcohol dependent society verging on social collapse. This is the picture built from the horror stories we have all read in newspapers and seen on television, the cheerless town once dubbed the stabbing capital of the globe. A place no one could possibly want to live.

One town is linked inextricably – and indeed financially – to the other. But this picture of two towns cast in uneasy co-existence does not tell the whole story. The untold story of Alice Springs – a story one has to dig a little deeper to find – is of a town desperately trying to heal its own divide. It is a story of hope.

****

When we first considered a stint in Central Australia we had to run the gauntlet of advice from those who care about us: “But it’s so hot!” and “Why on earth would you go to Alice Springs? There’s nothing there!” And my personal favourite – “You can only look so many times at a big red rock.” (Uluru is some 450km to the south west of Alice Springs. Many were convinced we would be able to see it from our back verandah.)

It was the start of an important discovery about many of our fellow coast- bound Australians, whose general knowledge of the outback and the Red Centre specifically, is poor. Even the most stridently opinionated had not been to Alice Springs. This of course didn’t stop them expressing their fact-free views. How could they know of the rugged, prehistoric landscape I had seen on the final approach to Alice Springs airport that first time; soaring bluffs of rust-coloured stone divided by winding, sandy river- scapes and a diverse flora that was just springing to life after a recent bout of rain? There was something about the smell and feel of the air, a timbre in the voices and conversations that I hadn’t heard when waving goodbye to the coast.

I was reminded of my father’s journey more than a half century earlier, when the New Jersey-born former air force sergeant had driven from Seattle to Anchorage, Alaska to find work and a new life. With his story foremost in my mind I stepped in to Central Australia from the plane for the first time in October of 1998, and had the oddest feeling I had come home. And some taut-pulled wire deep within my ribs relaxed a notch.

By late 2000 I’d intermittently spent some months in Central Australia, made friends and caught the bug that brings people here from all walks of life. Growing up in Sydney’s south-west, I’d had little experience of Aboriginal people. In Alice Springs I was meeting them, shopping among them and playing music with them. This was certainly a different Australia to the one I knew. Importantly, it seemed, I’d seen the usually-dry Todd River flow three times which, according to Alice folklore, makes one an honorary local.

Home to some 27,000 people, Alice Springs holds a special place at the heart of Australian culture. It is popularly considered a spiritual place, imbued with mystery and a staggering geography that has attracted tourists from across the globe to swim its gorges, walk its trails, experience Aboriginal traditions and visit the nearby well-known landmark of Uluru.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the town’s remoteness: two airlines – one of them just three days a week – and a 1500 kilometre drive north or south to the nearest major city. As a local comedian put it: “Alice has everything you need, without the burden of choice.”

To this isolated bit of arid zone add descendants of early pioneers and Afghan cameleers, US citizens working at Pine Gap’s Joint Defence Facility and their families, migrants bolstering a workforce clamouring for staff, Aborigines traditional and modern, more lesbians per capita than anywhere else in Australia, and a host of other blow-ins like myself, and you have some inkling of the demographic potpurri that Australia’s once hard-living outback town has become. Perhaps most importantly, modern Alice Springs finds itself at the cutting edge of Australian indigenous relations, in a young country struggling to find an honest and enduring voice of reconciliation.

****

I started at the newspaper on January 8, 2001. It was everything Annie Proulx might have led me to expect from her fictional Newfoundland rag The Gammy Bird – the newsroom characters, the extraordinary tales that reared up to defy their small town roots, a chronic lack of staff and little time for training. There were times I felt very much cast in the role of her main character, the hapless Quoyle.

Rain had drenched the normally dry desert landscape for two years running. So the ranges, which cut an ancient swath through the centre of the settlement – and that on previous visits I had bookmarked as sparsely vegetated – were now covered in a mat of vibrant greens bringing up sharply the deeply weathered reds of the local sandstone. It looked like a rugged mountain paradise, warm, and painted in earthy colours spooned from some giant artist’s palette, then splashed right across the middle of my new world. It was a sign, I reasoned: I had arrived at exactly the right moment.

We stayed at first with friends who were kind enough to share their home with us for a few months. Hospitality is something found in abundance in Alice Springs. It’s simply part of the place, like summer flies and red rocks. People depend on each other. But it’s not a burden. It’s just life. We’d stayed for a time with these people a couple of years earlier, including a memorable winter in their doorless back shed when their home was already full with other guests. Night time temperatures that June dipped to a bone-snapping -5°C. We stuffed our swag with blankets and wrapped ourselves each night into its cocoon, shivering until our bodies warmed us over. Then, spying through the doorless doorway, we’d make shapes from the gazillion and one stars that light up the clear desert skies at night. Our friends’ dog would make her way eventually to the warmth of our canvas and wool bundle, drape herself across the top and little by little we’d all fall into a peaceful slumber.

****

My job at the paper was going well and my fiancé found work aplenty. Half way through 2001 we bought a house, former government stock, badly dilapidated, and started renovating. Our decision was based on buying being cheaper than renting. Still, it also marked an early stepping up of our commitment to the town.

When I first came to Alice Springs, I had, like many before me, reckoned it to be the land of opportunity. The town rang with a sense of freedom captured in the idea of ‘being Territorian’, a people unfettered by the rules to which less fortunate ‘southerners’ were forced to adhere. Open speed limits – an attraction for some – were just one of the benefits. All I really knew back then was that Alice Springs was a bustling tourist hub, gateway to Uluru and the central supply point for a mining industry about to “go big”, as local property investors would tell visitors and new chums at every opportunity. “When it goes mate, you’ll write your own ticket,” was the general consensus. Newcomers took their pick of jobs in a market with as much work as an active job seeker could want.

And seniors got a look in as well. The skills shortage was so pressing that older workers found themselves welcomed rather than shunned, which was often their finding in the big cities where age and experience were no longer valued. It was the Australia of old, the one my parents had told me about, where everyone got a fair go and if you worked hard, you could make good.

But Alice Springs was also the Australia of old in other ways, where many Aborigines were served at the back of pubs and couldn’t get a room at some hostels, where thousands lived in abject and highly visible poverty in the river and camps on the fringe of town, and where alcohol fuelled a culture of violence and despair. Even a short visit to Alice Springs reveals to the visitor this sorrowful underbelly, an entire community of people living as ghosts on the edge of another.

****

The two towns of Alice Springs are light years apart. Even though the region was first explored a century and a half ago, as recently as the 1980s some Central Australian Aborigines had still not encountered a white person. Change has come for some of these people within less than a generation. More and more, a once nomadic bush people are being forced into town, to a place and lifestyle quite foreign to them. Even for those with longer exposure to a European way of life, or for children left bereft of cultural roots as the last generations of elders is lost, the transition is no less disconcerting.

On current birth rates the population of Alice Springs will, within 50 years, be equal measures black and white. While a growing number of Aborigines fill important roles in the town, a significant proportion remain on welfare, many unemployable owing to a lack of effective education, work experience, poor health, a different cultural outlook, or a combination of all these. Such a situation will prove impossible to sustain. Helping Central Australia’s Aboriginal people to become job- and modern world-ready, or finding some viable alternative, is Alice Springs’ – and indeed the nation’s – greatest challenge.

****

Yet on the smaller settlements, far removed from the town, some Aboriginal people live a more traditional way of life. This is cleverly depicted as providing salvation for the young Aboriginal couple at the centre of Alice Springs filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s award-winning Samson and Delilah. The couple flee the temptations and dangers of town in favour of the isolation of a remote settlement. Is this the only solution?

In 2007 I visited the home of Aboriginal artist and former stockman Lindsay Bird at the outstation of Mulga Bore, about 190 kilometres north of Alice Springs. I was there to report for the newspaper on the launch of a land agreement that hoped to kick-start irrigated grape production in the region. Along with a training centre for the young, the deal held real hope for Lindsay and his community, whose home in the sandy desert - now touted as prime irrigated horticulture country – might just be their economic salvation.

Lindsay’s a little over 70. With his wife and three daughters, he lived in the tiny community of about 100 in what was, I suppose, a more traditional way than his counterparts in town. Yet his paintings hung in galleries across the globe, including New York and Dublin.

To Lindsay, reconciliation meant finding a future for his children and theirs. He told me that as we sat under the shade of a big tree, batting off flies in the 40°C heat. He wanted the best for those young people. But he wanted them to work for it.

Next to us there was a child’s see-saw, and the community’s little schoolhouse. Beyond, the sleepy settlement dozed fitfully in the mulga as it had done for decades. It was at that moment I knew Lindsay was right. Somehow, he was managing to live in two worlds. And, with calmness and authority, he would bring his family with him into this new era. If reconciliation in Australia was ever to mean anything, I reasoned, it was blokes like Lindsay Bird who would show us the way.

But the economic realities of service provision to support these outposts, scattered so widely across the Central Australian desert, are cruel. On the current trajectory, more and more people from out bush will be tipped into the major centre. Yet the result is the other Alice Springs, a community caught in limbo – no longer able to live in its so recent past, yet frustrated it can neither envisage, nor comprehend, its future.

One could call Alice Springs a social experiment at a grand scale, not reckoned by design of course, but in practical terms a useful analogy. The town is a litmus test, a microcosm of broader Australia, an Australia that is – and by needs must be – coming of age, a nation in which first Australians and other Australians face the realities of life together on the same dirt.

*** *

By early 2009 it was time to leave the newspaper and pursue other interests. As a family we still believed in the hope, in the town we had come to love, and so decided to stay. It’s not an uncommon thing. Many who remain in the town more than a few months fall in love with the place and elect to stay on.

Something keeps Alice Springs people – black and white – moving forward, milking the hope, believing the work being done is worthwhile. Yet violence, poverty, corruption and fiscal failure still dominate the headlines. And certainly there are political and administrative hurdles to be overcome. These are important stories, which must be told by media; it would be irresponsible to ignore them.

But let us not forget the deeper dimension of the story, the hope on which people here are building their lives, the story the media has little time to tell, yet the story on everyone’s lips. For, despite its pivotal role, the body politic is unlikely to bring together the two towns of Alice Springs. Yet progress is afoot at a more human level. The divide is being healed by the thousands who toil tirelessly far from the argy bargy of politics and clear of the media spotlight, working steadily, forging relationships, one at a time. Slowly, and as is the desert way it seems, many Central Australians believe through these relationships an understanding will be forged between black and white, an understanding that travels in both directions, something no law, government policy or federal intervention could ever hope to achieve.

Perhaps Lindsay Bird and others like him hold the key. Far from the bars and bottloes of Alice Springs where many of his contemporaries are lost in the wash of grog, and farther still from Canberra where the fortunes of Aboriginal people are won or lost in a game of political spin, Lindsay and other traditional men still hold sway on their homelands. For blokes like Lindsay, change must, by needs, come slowly. It’s the desert way.