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Overview
A personal, evocative, and unflinching account, this book reveals the texture of everyday life in Alice Springs, Australia, through the passage of the local seasons. Alice Springs, the most talked about yet least familiar place in Australia, is isolated and has extreme seasonal weather: searingly hot and bitterly cold. It is the heart of black Australia and the headquarters of the controversial Northern Territory Intervention. Questioning why frontier conflicts still hold sway in a place possessing a striking landscape and modern facilities, it will appeal to locals and visitors alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241142 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
| Series: | The City Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Alice Springs
By Eleanor Hogan
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Eleanor HoganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-601-7
CHAPTER 1
The topography of the Centre
It happens abruptly, the change in the landscape, flying from the coast towards the centre. The swimming pools and the rooftops of suburbia give way to chequerboards of crops and grazing land. There are no signs of civilisation except for the occasional farm or hamlet with its gouged-out dam, and the slashes of orange dirt highways. This scenery fades out quickly, to be replaced by shattered banks of cloud hanging low over red, calloused earth. To some eyes, the landscape registers as barren and void: terra nullius.
This is where the real world ends, as most Australians know it, and the outback – as in 'out the back of nowhere' – begins. Settlers originally feared this part of the continent as a hostile heartland that swallowed up explorers in search of an inland sea. Although the outback provides Australians with so much of their identity, most will never venture here, except for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Uluru. One of the unconscious fears that gnaw at the white Australian psyche is how precarious our grip is on this continent. We're a coastal, rather than a desert, people: we cling to its edges in capital cities that poet AD Hope once described as 'five teeming sores'. Underlying this fear is the notion of the emptiness, the deadness of the centre.
Alice Springs, or Mparntwe, as the place is known by its traditional owners, the Arrernte people, is at the continent's centre. As you fly towards Alice, the reptilian spine of the MacDonnell Ranges rises out of the plains. According to the Arrernte, the ranges were created by ancestral beings –Yeperenye,Ntyarlke and Utnerrengatye – caterpillars who originated in the east at a break in the ranges called Anthwerrke, or Emily Gap. These caterpillars travelled west, calling and shaping the physical landscape into being. The ranges form the present town's ramparts, shielding its south-west side like the remains of a European city's Roman walls. They are broken by a further, larger granite cleft – Heavitree Gap, or 'the Gap'.
Alice Springs is spread out on the other side of the ranges like a baseball diamond, its bottom tip cradled in the Gap. Stuart Highway cuts through town from near the airport, and goes straight on to Tennant Creek and Darwin. If you turn right just inside the Gap, the road heads past a brace of liquor outlets, cheap motels and backpacker hostels and up to Todd Mall, the main drag in the town's centre. The Mall, a brick-surfaced strip of road, boasts cafés offering al fresco dining and galleries selling Aboriginal artefacts on either side. Tourists, identifiable by their strong walking shoes and hats with flyveils, toil up and down in the heat. Knots of Aboriginal people drift past like shoals of disconsolate fish. They sometimes have limbs misshapen and faces disfigured by violent acts, signs of a hard life. Some humbug tourists and passers-by, unfurling scrolls of canvas with, 'You want caterpillar dreaming? Thirty dollars. Bush tomato dreaming – twenty dollars.'
The Todd River or Lhere Mpartnwe is parallel to the Mall, forming the eastern side of the town's diamond. Most of the year, the Todd is a dry, sandy highway running through the heart of Alice Springs. Occasionally storms engorge its banks, sometimes overflowing its causeways. When the rains stop, the water seeps away, leaving small shimmering pools, until eventually these disappear. The pinkish mud on the riverbed dries as though it still feels the thrust of water turbulence. Some gums growing in the river strain forwards, as if under the force of a deluge. But the Todd's main cargo is human. A visiting Irish comedian once described it as 'perhaps the only river filled with people rather than water'. People from communities often end up camping in the river because cheap accommodation is scarce.
A causeway near the Todd Tavern at the far end of the Mall connects the town to the Eastside, a fashionable suburban enclave with wide, native-gum-lined streets and large, old Territorian-style houses on suburban-size blocks of land. Sometimes wryly referred to as 'the ghetto', this part of town is home to Alice's chattering classes, a large expatriate population who've come from cities 'down south' to work in the local Aboriginal service delivery industry. Causeways further along the river link to a lush suburban pocket known as the Golf Course Estate, mainly inhabited by the Americans who work in secrecy out at Pine Gap, a US military base just out of town, built during the Cold War period as part of Australia's 'all the way with LBJ' approach to foreign policy.
About a kilometre north on the Todd is the Bush Telegraph Station, sometimes claimed as the 'real reason' for the establishment of Alice Springs. Built in 1872, it was part of the push to run an overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin, then to connect Australia to Asia and the rest of the world. The site was chosen for its proximity to a soak or waterhole that Charles Todd, the local postmaster and builder of the telegraph line, named after his wife, Alice. The town was first named 'Stuart' in 1888, after the first European explorer to chart the interior. Once the settlement had developed greater critical mass in 1933, its name changed to the softer, more congenial 'Alice Springs'. The words roll into 'Allypring' in Aboriginal English. Tour operators, national weather announcers and others from out of town often refer to the place as 'The Alice'. But many locals simply call it 'Alice'.
In 1875 Alice Springs was mooted as the future capital of Australia and in 1942 of the corridor of land between Adelaide and Darwin known sometimes as Centralia. From 1927 to 1931 Central Australia existed as a separate territory, from the latitude twenty degrees south to the South Australian border, until this arrangement was judged too unwieldy to govern. When Alice Springs attained city status and local selfgovernment in 1971, the Council preferred to keep the moniker of 'town' for tourist and marketing purposes, inspired by the notoriety of the book, film and television series A Town Like Alice. Bureaucrats often refer to it by the more functional title of 'regional service delivery centre'. Alice is a vital portal to central Australia: for tourists wanting to explore the desert and to have a brush with traditional Aboriginal culture; for government officials providing services and programs to the region; for art entrepreneurs and their less savoury cousins, the carpetbaggers in search of the latest seams of Aboriginal art to mine. It is also a jumping-off point for hippies, ferals, lesbians and social justice activists. The more conventional frontier types still rattle through town: miners, labourers, tradies and other contract workers. Traditional wisdom has it that those attracted to central Australia fall into three categories: missionaries, mercenaries and misfits. Others say that it's like Antarctica, a place where men go to get away from their wives.
The town sits at the juncture of three jurisdictions – the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia – in an area known unofficially as central Australia, or the tri-state or cross-border region. One section was called 'No Man's Land' until it was annexed by South Australia in 1861. The population of Alice Springs hovers around 27 000, the nearest sizeable regional centre being Tennant Creek, 500 kilometres north. It's estimated that 25 per cent of its population is Aboriginal, and some 14 500 Aboriginal people, known as A?a?u, live in central Australia. The Ananu comprise three major language families, encompassing sixteen distinct languages, of which most Ananu speak several, with English as their second, third, fourth or fifth language. Many circulate between Alice and its satellite communities, living at times 'on country' – their tribal land – or with friends and relatives in town. A group of Pintupi who came out of the central western desert region in 1984 are believed to be the last wholly traditional Aboriginal people in the area; some say there are other groups yet to make contact with western civilisation. Central Australia is popularly conceived of as being 'where the real blackfellas are', along with certain remote parts of western and northern Australia, although the bulk of the Aboriginal population live alongside their mainstream counterparts in the eastern states.
Alice Springs figures as a meeting place between cultures, not only as a gateway for tourists and others to the outback and the desert, but also as a brokerage point for its Aboriginal people. The late Arrernte artist W Rubuntja describes it as a 'little Central Australian Rome – too much Tywerrenge [a lot of Law] ... All over Australia this culture is alive. We still have the same culture, still sing the song ... It's the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.' Darryl Pearce, former CEO of the native title body Lhere Artepe, observes that Alice Springs has 'for a long time been the CBD of central Australia', the urban focus of the migration of other Aboriginal groups: 'If you take Alice as a city, then the 'burbs are Yuendumu, Papunya, and so forth.'
Many Aboriginal people come into Alice Springs from remote satellite communities to seek employment, to buy supplies, to receive treatment for chronic diseases or simply to entertain themselves. Some suggest this influx is part of the global phenomenon of urban drift. The federal and Territory governments have historically been reluctant to provide housing and infrastructure to remote communities and settlements, arguing that they're too small and isolated to be sustainable over the long term. Why support these communities, the logic goes, if people are gradually filtering from remote areas into towns and cities with greater resources? Whatever the theory, these people are caught in an unfortunate pincer-like movement. The local Town Council, buoyed by public outcry, doesn't want to encourage community people to stay, claiming that they will contribute to overcrowding in the camps on the town's fringes and the public housing where their friends and relatives live. There have also been complaints that community people don't have the living skills to function in town, since they've only 'just come out of the bush'.
The Council fears building low-budget, temporary accommodation for community visitors, in case it leads to the creation of more high-density, impoverished living areas for Aboriginal people, like the town camps. There are eighteen Aboriginal-owned housing associations – or town camps, as they are popularly known – dotted across Alice Springs. Some of the camps predate the gazetting of the town in 1888. They are home to descendants of people, mainly Arrernte, who were uprooted from their traditional lands by the spread of the pastoral industry, and where they congregated during regimes of race restrictions.
The pastoralists originally welcomed the town camps' presence as a sign of their 'victory' in taking control of the area, and as a source of cheap labour, but the camps have since been pilloried by generations of townsfolk as cesspools of vice and depravity. In 1934, medical doctor Charles Duguid was appalled to find Aboriginal people in Alice Springs living in 'utter degradation, clad in dirty rags and sheltered in kennel-like arrangements put together with old bags and bits of disused galvanised iron picked up at the village dump.' As recently as 2009, residents of two camps were housed in tin sheds without running water or power. The town camps have around 1600 to 2000 residents, although numbers may swell up to 3500 when community people visit Alice Springs for a special event.
Recently more people, black and white, have come into town as a result of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act (the NTER or 'Intervention'). In late June 2007, the federal government declared a 'state of emergency' in the Territory, announcing a series of measures ostensibly to protect the welfare of children and families in Aboriginal communities. This act was widely criticised as a political gambit, calculated to garner votes from racist elements within the Australian population and to facilitate a 'land grab' from the town camps and communities it affected. Whatever the Intervention's intent, it brought increasing numbers of bureaucrats and tradespeople to work and community people to access services in Alice Springs, putting pressure on housing and accommodation options. The town has long said to be 'landlocked' by native title claims, reducing the supply of properties and inflating local real estate prices, although the Territory government and Lhere Artepe have recently made agreements to develop two residential areas.
An almost unspoken stand-off exists between the black and white populations in Alice Springs. There are people with family memories of local massacres by European settlers and it's only been several decades since the law was dropped which prohibited Aboriginal people from being within a two-mile radius of the town's centre without a permit. It's unusual to see black and white people socialising in town; rarer to see an Aboriginal person employed in a mainstream organisation or franchise, apart from an Indigenous one. The town is frequently described as being built on the 'Aboriginal dollar': a study commissioned by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of Alice Springs in 1989 found that Aboriginal spending constituted one third of regional economic activity. Government, health and community service delivery, often through the 'Aboriginal industry', are among the top contributors to the gross regional product. The reliance on government funding, however, fuels some white resentment about the perceived privileges Indigenous people receive and complaints about a lack of entrepreneurial vision. The gulf between the populations is more heightened than in most urban cities, including the multicultural, northern city of Darwin. Alice is, to a degree, a microcosm of Australia's colonial history, minus some of the recent waves of immigration; a place where frontier conflicts are still being played out.
* * *
It was quite true; this town had everything a reasonable girl could want – a hairdressing saloon, a good dress shop or two, two picture houses ... She turned into the milk bar at about nine o'clock and bought herself an ice cream soda. If this was the outback, she thought, there were a great many worse places.
I came to Alice Springs in late 2003 in search of a 'desert change'. I had been working as a public servant in Indigenous affairs since 1998, including for the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. As a government bureaucrat, I often used Alice Springs as an entry point for canvassing information from remote communities and organisations delivering services to Aboriginal people in central Australia. Over the years I became more interested in the issues facing this region – enough to consider living there.
In mid-2003, I drove up from Adelaide to Alice Springs with some colleagues to investigate the outcomes of a coronial inquiry into the deaths of three petrol sniffers on the A?a?u Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands in central Australia. We travelled long distances to remote hamlets where we sat in the dirt and talked to Aboriginal people, and slept on swags near the side of the road, fearful of being stampeded by feral camels in the middle of the night.
After this trip, an Aboriginal co-worker suggested that I apply for a job in Alice Springs: the place was always in need of good professionals, she told me. I obtained a position in a government organisation in Alice Springs relatively quickly, and left Sydney almost on a whim. I felt as if I had jumped ship, although it wasn't so unusual for me to move: something of a wanderer, I had lived in Manchester, Melbourne and Canberra for significant periods of time.
To some degree, I was seduced by the Centralian landscape and its unexpected contrasts: green and rolling in parts; burnt orange with the spare, blackened remnants of vegetation in others. I was also tired of the insularity and status anxiety associated with living in Sydney, the city that most embodies Australia's preoccupations with consumerism and the coast. The grittiness of everyday life in Alice Springs, the thought of being brought face to face with some of the nation's core issues, appealed to me. I had an idea, too, that I would write about life in the Centre, to try and communicate what it was like, living between two populations.
After six months of living in Alice Springs, my employer folded and I was offered an all-expensespaid relocation back to Sydney. But I was in no hurry to return. I had set up a life: a new circle of friends, a yoga class, a reading group, a cycling club, a hairdresser, and so forth. Like Jean Paget in A Town Like Alice, I sensed the possibility of the place. Real estate was affordable by Sydney standards, work was readily available for middle-class professionals, and there were lively cultural and sporting communities to join, all combined with the exceptional landscape and the sheer curiosity value of the place. True, local cinema offerings were somewhat B-grade, but otherwise most things were easier, more proximate than in a major capital city. The Internet also made much possible.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alice Springs by Eleanor Hogan. Copyright © 2012 Eleanor Hogan. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Uterne mpepe,1 The topography of the Centre,
Alhwerrpe urle,
2 The Gap,
3 'You make me sick, anyway',
4 The Matilda,
Alhwerrpe mpepe,
5 'Was that a true story?',
6 Mukata, mukata,
Urlpme-urlpme,
7 Desert roses,
8 Another world,
9 The Shelter,
Uterne urle,
10 Real black magic,
11 The exhibition,
12 'Instead of thinking bad',
Uterne akngerre anthurre re,
13 The big heat,
Acknowledgments,