Alice Springs

15-17 May
Alice Springs
Partly sunny and mild

I wish I had better news to report abut my own health. At the Cock 'n' Bull dinner on the 13th, I could only manage to eat a bite or two of my meal, and things got much worse afterwards. I awoke in the early morning hours with a pounding headache and shivers, and started having bouts of diarrhea. I got myself over to a 24-hour clinic nearby, where the doctor diagnosed me with a viral infection. He said I should expect the symptoms to lessen over the next few days, and prescribed medication to control my guts. MY main concern was whether I could continue to travel with the students. He thought that plane flights were fine, but that I needed to rest for awhile.

I could eat hardly anything yesterday -- it was not that I couldn't keep food down; I just had no appetite at all! I had no breakfast at all, and maybe a cracker or two during the flight. After we landed in Alice Springs, I told the students what was going on, and some of them brought me some fruit and crackers, which I have since managed to eat.

It is now the morning of the 15th. I sent the students on their day tour of Alice Springs with Brook, one of the staff members here. The tour is a visit to the Alice Springs Desert Park, the Royal Flying Doctors Service, a reptile zoo, the School of the Air, the old telegraph station, and ANZAC Hill.

The Desert Park is a park-style zoo and botanical garden devoted to the types of environments encountered in central Australia: red sand desert, scrub woodlands, and 'upside-down' rivers. it has several walk-through bird enclosures, as well as a free flight bird show that I've told the students they must attend.

The Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS) was started by John Flynn in the early 20th century as a means of delivering health care to remote regions of the Outback. When there is a medical emergency on a cattle station, the nearest doctor may be hundreds of miles away. Medical help is available via the phone, and most stations will have a color-coded medical kit on hand so that the people on the station can administer a more extensive first-aid to victims. If required, the RFDS will fly out to the station with a medical team to transport the patient to hospital. RFDS also conducts health clinics on a regular basis, where people on the stations can receive physicals, vaccinations, and consultations.

I have not been to the reptile zoo before; the folks here at Toddy's suggested it and I added it to the tour. I will depend on student reports to decide if I want to keep it as a part of the tour. They have seen so many zoos at this point that I fear it might get a little repetitious, but since this place concentrates on desert species, I thought it was worth a try.

The School of the Air (SOA) is another way of addressing the needs of people living in remote regions of the Outback. The SOA is a school, conducted via satellite internet, to children in cattle and sheep stations, in Aboriginal villages, and anywhere else there are children isolated by distance who need schooling. The presentation is an all too brief introduction to the SOA and a bit of its history. At its inception in the 1950s, instruction was conducted via two-way radio, with exams, papers, textbooks and other course materials delivered by mail. Since then, the SOA has taken advantage of technological advancements as they've become available to enhance the educational experience of the children.

Alice Springs is where it is due to a few specific reasons. In the 19th century, telegraph lines were connecting all parts of the British empire to London, and the plan was to run a line from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north, where an undersea cable would then run up through Asia and continue on. Railways would run alongside the telegraph, thus providing a means to move freight more easily and cheaply.

But several expeditions revealed -- sometimes tragically -- just how forbidding the center of Australia can be. Several mountain ranges run east to west, providing a barrier to the straight level land needed for rail lines. Water would be needed, not only for human survival, but for the steam engines of the day. The gap between the mountains plus the availability of water in the nearby 'upside-down' river meant that the location was ideal. The explorers mistakenly thought that there was a spring located in the riverbed, but the standing water was only the result of a recent rainfall. Nevertheless, they found a reliable source of water, and a gap in the mountains, and so the Alice Springs Telegraph Station was founded.

The telegraph station operated for many years, but as technology improved and new means of communication came online, the need for it eventually lessened and it was closed down. By this time, of course, the city of Alice Springs had sprung up just south of the station, and served as a bit of civilization in the center of the young country. Th buildings of the telegraph station were converted for use as a native school called 'The Bungalow' by the local Aborigines. When the policies that created the Stolen Generation were finally abandoned in 1970, the Bungalow was shut down and languished until it was reopened as a living history museum.

It is now the morning of the 17th. While my condition has improved, I was clearly not well enough for camping, so I made the hard choice yesterday to send the students on the camping trip without me, in the capable hands of their tour guide, Hayley. The only alternative would have been to keep all of them here at Toddy's with nothing planned, and that just seemed so unfair. While they were disappointed that I wouldn't be along, they still seemed excited about getting out in the bush. I'm looking forward to seeing their photos.

They return to Alice Springs tomorrow, and then we return to Sydney and start making our way back home.