I got a bird’s eye view of about a thousand miles of Australian desert, mountains, sandy rivers, and “gibber plains” this week and it was about as much fun as a person can have in a commercial airliner seat.
A courteous Qantas check-in agent at the Alice Springs Airport assigned me and Kristi to window and aisle seats toward the front of the plane to Brisbane when I told him I wanted to see the countryside. I’m grateful that he did.
The sky was clear and for an hour and a half I sat transfixed by the scenery passing below at, I suppose, 600 miles an hour or more. My camera has an “aerial photo” setting and a zoom lens with an anti-shake mechanism, so I shot picture after picture of territory I’d never seen before and may never fly over again.
We’d just spent a week hiking around in “the red center” of Australia, starting in Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), driving to King’s Canyon, and then using Alice Springs as a base for tours to its west and east.
From our home-bound plane on Wednesday afternoon, I got to see country similar to and different from what we’d hiked and I was made sharply aware of the luxuries of modern-day life by Alice on the Line, a book about one family’s experience of travel to, and life in, Alice Springs a century ago.
With the help of a professional writer, Douglas Lockwood, Doris Bradshaw Blackwell told of traveling in 1899 from Adelaide with her mother and siblings to join her father, the newly appointed manager of the telegraph station in Alice Springs. She was eight years old and 300 miles of the trip involved riding for 14 days in either a buggy or a wagon, neither of which offered any protection from sun or storms. It’s quite a story.
We got to visit Telegraph Station Museum, including the house the Bradshaws lived in until Doris was 16. Built of stone and located two miles from what was then a tiny village known as “the Alice,” it is today much as it appears in black-and-white photos from the early 1900s.
As the landscape slipped past, below my comfortable airline seat, I noticed long red streaks that puzzled me at first. They were part of the scenery for about an hour.
I realized what I was seeing when I recalled Doris Blackwell’s tale of the first attempt to drive an automobile from south to north across Australia by way of Alice Springs. Two intrepid drivers, who had surely seen all the sand they wanted to after crossing the dry expanse of the Finke River five times, were almost defeated by what she called “the dreaded Depot Sandhills.”
Some, she wrote, “were sixty feet high with grades of one in three.” In an earlier winter she had seen horses struggle mightily to pull a buggy over those and this first-ever car trip was attempted in the summertime, when the sand was too hot to touch.
In one four-mile stretch, there were 13 such sand hills and “of the 25 miles from Horseshoe Bend to Alice Well there was hard surface for only 200 yards.” A team of mules was required to get the car through.
Oh, and the hard surface? It was probably what Doris Blackwell called “gibber plain,” which I had to look up in my Australian dictionary. That, it turns out, is “arid, stony area of low relief in which stones form a surface area.”
So I was looking down from my seat in the sky for much of our flight’s first hour at mountains, valleys, and gibber plains interrupted by narrow hills of red sand dunes running in parallel lines for many scores of miles. I have pictures of hundreds of them. From the ground level, they must be seen as reaching from horizon to horizon.
I tip my hat to the men, women, and children who were brave enough to be pioneers, and to the Aboriginals who found a way to live successfully for untold generations in such landscapes before the Europeans came with horses, camels, cars, and telegraph lines.
I’m way too soft to have been one of either group. I’m glad we got to hike along well-maintained National Park trails for a week, but for getting place to place, I prefer the bird’s eye view.
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