The Stone Cottage at Ooraminna Station, a half-hour drive into the Australian Outback from Alice Springs. Photo / Joanna Wane
Joanna Wane explores the extraordinary desert landscape of Alice Springs.
Sunset has plunged the desert into darkness but the night air is warm on our skin as we creep along wearing infra-red headlamps, searching for movement in the bush.
“Where are you going, buddy? There he is! A juvenile bandicoot. Look at him! Possibly a month out of the pouch.” That’s James, the ranger on our nocturnal tour of Alice Springs Desert Park. He’s an excitable chap, as enthusiastic about marsupials and macropods as Steve Irwin was about crocs.
Already, we’ve encountered a few skittish brush-tailed bettongs — a type of rat-kangaroo — the notoriously shy bilby, which has ears like a rabbit, and the endangered mala, a hare-wallaby brought back from the brink of extinction when the population plummeted to just 27. All mala alive today can trace their whakapapa directly back to them.
Up ahead, James spots a spiny shadow to the left of the path. It’s an echidna (the name, which comes from a character in Greek mythology, means “the mother of monsters” but when it comes to dangerous wildlife in Australia, they’re the least of your worries).
“Are you a friendly echidna or are you a get out of here ASAP echidna?” says James, affectionately, tracking its waddling gait with his torch. “The latter, I think. This is top speed for an echidna. He’s really motoring today.”
Just 7km from Alice Springs township, at the base of the West MacDonnell Ranges, the park includes 52ha surrounded by a predator-proof fence line. Some pivotal scenes in the recent drama series, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart — starring Sigourney Weaver and based on Holly Ringwald’s bestselling book — were shot on location here.
In summer, a night tour is the perfect respite from daytime temperatures that regularly hit the mid-30s in the Red Centre. The park is closely connected to the local Arrernte people, whose stories are embedded in the dramatic desert landscape and the plant and animal life that thrives in even the harshest conditions.
Mala have great significance, James tells us, and their dreaming stories are consistent through many language groups, from the far side of Tennant Creek to the north to Uluru (Ayers Rock) in the south.
“Dreamtime stories are basically textbooks,” he says. “Eagle dreaming was about hunting. With mala, their dreaming was a bit different — more of a road map. If you knew the songs and stories about mala, you knew your way around Central Australia, which people were where and places to avoid.”
Back at the visitor centre, James is waving us off when a familiar bird call sounds from the treetops. High up in the branches, he spots a pint-sized boobook owl, better known in Aotearoa as a ruru or morepork.
Home to the Arrernte people for more than 20,000 years, the Lhere Mparntwe/Todd River flats looked like promising pastoral country to John McDouall Stuart, the first white fella to pass this way, in 1860. The original township was called Stuart after him, and its name wasn’t officially changed to Alice Springs until the 1930s.
A flourishing gold town in the late 19th century and later home to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, Alice has been hard-hit by Covid. But the tourism industry, a vital source of income, is slowly getting back on its feet and there’s plenty to recommend it as a base for exploring the Northern Territory outback.
On the flash side of town, there’s a casino and four-star hotels. Squeakywindmill runs luxury glamping at the foot of the ranges, opposite a camel farm that does hour-long sunset tours. Page 27 is a little slice of Melbourne’s laneway cafe culture and Epilogue Lounge, on the main street, is an all-day eatery with live music each week in the rooftop bar.
Alice Springs has the highest number of art galleries and art centres per capita in Australia and our first stop, straight from the airport, is the Araluen Arts Centre, where the inhouse theatre is setting up for a production of Roald Dahl’s The Twits.
It’s perfect timing because the annual Desert Mob exhibition is on, featuring hundreds of pieces of work by artists across Central Australia — from traditional dot paintings to intricately decorated Hermannsburg pottery and an extraordinary collection of “mutukas” made by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers collective, using dried grass and repurposed metal from the skeletons of abandoned cars.
Just as Grahame Sydney captures the colours and contours of the Central Otago landscape so vividly, this is Albert Namatjira country. In a “sacred storeroom”, accessible to the public on request, the art centre’s director, Felicity Green, rolls out panel after panel of his glowing watercolour landscapes.
A pioneer of contemporary indigenous Australian art, Namatjira began making boomerangs for the tourist trade and didn’t start painting until he was 32.
Despite the enormous success that followed, his was a troubled life caught between two worlds and he died in 1959, just two years after becoming the first indigenous person to be granted citizenship. In Uluru, I find a children’s picture book about him, written and illustrated by his great-grandson, Vincent, the first Aboriginal artist to win the prestigious Archibald Prize.
Namatjira was born at Hermannsburg, an Aboriginal mission established by Lutheran missionaries from Germany in the 1870s, about 120km west of Alice Springs. It’s now a restored historic precinct, open Wednesday to Sunday, with a cafe that serves apple strudel.
Nearby, we stop at the whitewashed two-bedroom house Namatjira built from local sandstone for his wife and seven children, financed by the sale of 38 of his paintings. There’s a vase with dried flowers on the windowsill, which is trimmed with green, and a tiny fireplace.
Our guide for the day, John Stafford from Alice Springs Expeditions, walks ahead of us through the long grass to the door of Namatjira’s house, checking for snakes, but the only one we ever see is a black-headed western brown playing chicken with cars on the highway.
Everything feels so ancient here. At Tnorala (Gosse Bluff), a comet slammed into the rock 142 million years ago. Releasing one million times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the impact created a crater 20km across. Despite shrinkage through erosion, the scale of it remains astonishing today. To the caretakers of the land, who tell Dreamtime stories about the Milky Way, this is a “makamaka”, a very sacred place.
That night, we watch the sky turn orange from the veranda at Ooraminna Station Homestead, over a dinner of steak and barbecued corn cobs at the Wild Horse Bar & Grill. A half-hour drive from Alice Springs, the sprawling property has spectacular views, its own billabong and the remnants of a Wild West-style film set — built for a movie based on folk legend Ted Egan’s song The Drover’s Boy, a project that never went ahead.
My accommodation in the Stone Cottage, one or four charmingly rustic cabins, was originally the police station and there’s an extra bedroom out back in what was once the jailhouse. The station is a popular location for functions and film shoots; more than 100 cast and crew spent six days on-site for The Bachelor USA.
Owner Nicky Lorimer grew up in Sydney’s northern beaches. You couldn’t drag her out of the Red Centre now. “It’s been amazing watching the children grow up here, being born on a horse,” she says. Recent rainfall has broken a long drought and the desert is bursting with colour.
“Two or three years ago, it was just red rock. There wasn’t a single flower. Now you can’t even see the sand dunes. It really is magical.”
GETTING THERE
Air NZ, Qantas, Jetstar and AirAsia all fly direct from Auckland to Sydney International Airport.
Alice Springs is a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Sydney’s domestic terminal. If you’re heading on to Uluru, break the five-hour drive with an overnight stay at Kings Canyon, then beat the heat with a 6km rim walk at sunrise for spectacular 360-degree views. You can customise a 4WD trip with Alice Springs Expeditions (alicespringsexpeditions.com.au) or check out the range of itineraries at northernterritory.com
DETAILS
northernterritory.com
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