At the Centre
The way we live, learn and celebrate life in the Centre of Australia.
The hospital they didn’t want
With the ever-spreading Alice Springs Hospital near the end of its latest growth spurt, it’s fascinating to learn how ambivalent townspeople were about the idea of a hospital in the first place. As Max Griffiths related in last month’s Doreen Braitling Memorial lecture, some Central Australians actively campaigned against the town’s first hospital, Adelaide Hospital. Fate intervened rather brutally to reveal the value of professional nursing care. Max, who succeeded Fred McKay and John Fly...Read more
CASA and the zen of tourism
Demographer Dean Carson from Charles Darwin University has a point when he says Alice Springs is moving away from a tourism-based economy – but I suspect there’s a lot more to it. Just about every academic opinion gets routinely oversimplified for the sake of radio news, so it would be unfair to judge Dean’s views via its passage from media release through the 8.30 news to the morning talk show. But the story of the Central Australian Supported Accommodation (CASA) service’s art program ...Read more
Return of the man from Oodnadatta
The unchanging ambience of ever-gracious Adelaide House, some spirited pretending and three co-operative camels assisted time travellers on a journey to meet one of the Centre’s most generous souls in Alice’s annual Heritage Festival this month. It’s a hundred years since Plowman, like many others of his ilk, was persuaded by the legendary John Flynn to work for the Australian Inland Mission, which he did as a volunteer up until 1917. Stationed in Oodnadatta, which was then...Read more
What’s the buzz, bee-eaters? Good news and bad …
It’s been amazing to see how much effect a couple of inches of rain have had on the countryside around Alice – not to mention educational. Could we learn something from this? After a relatively dry summer, the rain has perked up the place to a surprising degree, and it’s not just the euros lapping it up. Around town (including our back yard), citrus are bursting into autumn flowering, while many natives are also blooming for the second time in less than a year. This had led to ...Read more
Giant rock wallaby looms over Heavitree Gap!
Story and photos by Alex Nelson And now for something completely different … Fairly early on Sunday morning, following one of the most divisive town council election campaigns in the history of Alice Springs, I walked from my home in the Old Eastside along the east bank of the much-maligned Todd River, into the grounds of the Olive Pink Botanic Garden (where once I used to work) and up to the top of Meyers Hill. I was a man on a mission because there was a particular photograph I wa...Read more
On the verge of abundance
It would be nice if last week’s lovely rain had greened up the thoughts and policies of Alice’s prospective new Mayor as councillors as much as it has the buffel grass. Various creative minds are pushing the idea of a comprehensive town plan for Alice Springs; perhaps it should include a more holistic, less fragmented approach to good old H2O. The Alice Springs Town Council could lead the way. I note from an article in last Friday’s Centralian Advocate that candidate Jade Kudrenko is keen ...Read more
The joy of composting
Despite numerous experiments and occasional failures, I have always found the dirty business of making compost a deeply satisfying and somehow magical experience. Not everyone gets it, of course. But Alice Springs Steiner School gardener Bill Pechey and Colleen O’Malley do, and for that reason I heartily recommend their compost-making workshop at the school this weekend. I took my video camera along to a similar session in August last year, and got more than I bargained for, content-wise, whic...Read more
A Cloud Appreciation Society near you
For a short month, even in a leap year, February in Alice has been a real variety show, weather-wise. Starting out with the coolest mid-summer weather I can remember in a dry spell, the days drifted gradually into enveloping dry heat, fading into cool nights before a descent into steamy tropicana on the weekend. I’ve pretty well given up complaining about the weather in the Centre, at least in public. When the ants are going crazy, the doors get hard to shut, and your swampy is utterly swa...Read more
Roadkill’s ‘bittersweet’ story
Bill Lowe from Land for Wildlife has asked travelling folk to take a slightly closer look at roadkill; while it’s always a sad sight, it can bring good news of a sort. As Bill reported on the Land For Wildlife blog, he received “bittersweet” tidings from Dave Price in the form of a photo of a roadkilled Spectacled Hare-wallaby Lagorchestes conspicillatus he and wife Bess Price had spotted just north of Rabbit Flats on the Tanami Road. Bill reports: Initially they thought it m...Read more
What a knock-out!
I had an unexpected visitor banging on the front door, just after I had reluctantly crawled out of bed. Just one loud knock; who could it be, at 7.30 am, I wondered grumpily. I opened the door with slight trepidation. No sign of the knocker, until I looked down to notice a smudge of grey feathers on our front steps. Trepidation ongoing, I gently scooped the apparently lifeless visitor on to my hand, where it lay on its back, legs in the air. Now I could see much more than shades of grey: an oran...Read more
The missionary times: look again, says Strehlow
It’s not hard to see why John Strehlow chose to put the grandmother he never met at the centre of his epic volume The Tale of Frieda Keyser. If the missionaries of Central Australia have been neglected and undervalued by posterity, their wives have been more so, despite the huge sacrifices they often made for the people of the Centre. As I discovered when I caught up with Strehlow recently, he and his book are imbued with a 21st century mission of their own: to address widely-held assumptions ...Read more
Bush food’s new life in garden
An Aboriginal-owned enterprise near Alice Springs is pioneering the cultivation of one of the world’s most ancient wild foods with help from an unlikely source : a Chinese university. Desert Garden Produce’s Max Emery is anticipating a record harvest of as much as one a half tonnes of kutjera, which will be exported to Melbourne and end as part of the recipe of a mass-produced gourmet sausage. After interviewing Max in 2010 about the Rainbow Valley farm, which is owned and operated by local ...Read more
Recent Features
- The hospital they didn't want
- The secret life of white-plumed honeyeaters
- Crime levels not new: police commissioner
- Mandatory treatment plan would cost hundreds of millions
- Misbehavers "not welcome": police commissioner
- That famous Whitegate mob again
- CASA and the zen of tourism
- Return of the man from Oodnadatta
- The memories are always there
- More truancy officers
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