Dirk and Joke doing the Half-lap: Day 61: From Taylor’s Creek to Alice Springs (01/08/12)

The first day of our third month had dawned. We had 300-odd kms to go to Alice Springs. We drove through Barrow Springs with its mountains which strongly reminded me of the South African Karroo.

Mountains at Barrow Springs

Original telegraph pole from the Overland Telegraph

Then we turned off on a whim to an aboriginal art gallery at Aileron about 180 kms into the trip. We were attracted by the enormous statue of an aboriginal on the hill behind the roadhouse.

Statue of Arrernte hunter on the hill. Next to the shed is a statue group of an aboriginal lady and child with a goanna.

The gallery was pleasant and roomy and well-presented. It was run by a chap called Russell who represented artists of the Arrernte people. He put anything they produced up for sale with a suggested price and all the money went back to the artists. There was an immediate sense of decency and rightness about this operation which Joke and I both noticed. Here was no evidence of exploitation which the roadhouse culture smacked of across Queensland and NT so far. Looking further we noticed Christian themes on a number of the paintings for sale, as well as historical photos of Lutheran pastors, white and black and other evidence which pointed to a Christian bias at this gallery. Sure enough, our conversation with Russell brought to light that he was in fact a missionary who did the gallery work as a self-help employment program on the side.

We chatted with him for quite a while, asking questions about what we had seen and experienced and he gave us a lot of interesting answers. Our not being greeted in Tennant Creek was part of a low self-esteem problem that many urban fringe aboriginals have. He described their non-western attitudes to work and time, and also spoke in a very sensible way about aboriginal “spirituality” which nowadays is held as being in opposition almost to the Christian message. He said that “his” people did not see the Dreamtime and other aspects of traditional aboriginal religion in the way it is seen in Canberra or in popular white culture. They understand evil and its place in their lives, and those who come to believe can clearly see the shortcomings of traditional aboriginal religion in dealing with that evil. Even those who are not Christians can acknowledge that.

He spoke passionately about one of the chief agents of evil in contemporary aboriginal life: alcohol. You could clearly see that this was an important topic to him, and that he was very vocal in his efforts to restrict the open slather on alcohol in the Territory. He spoke bitterly of the white vested interests in the alcohol industry and that white Territorians, and in fact white Australians in general were enslaved to alcohol themselves and could not envisage restrictions in availability of supply which would do so much good for the aboriginal communities.

We wandered off quite moved by this man and his passionate views. Recourse to the Internet showed that he was Russell Guy, an ex-disc jockey at 2JJ, quite well known in music circles who had wandered away from that life into the bush in the 80’s or 90’s. The Territory newspapers revealed more of his anti-alcohol stance, and the opposition to him of the Territorial political establishment. Quite an interesting bloke and well worth visiting if you are out this way. Aileron.

Highest spot on the Stuart Highway. Cairn to prove it. Dedicated to some public servant or other. Absolutely no indication of how high! So we took a silly photo. Logical.

In Joke’s mind’s eye, Alice Springs was a town on a dusty plain with a mountain range, the Macdonnels, in the background. In my mind’s eye, the town was sitting square in a gap in the Macdonnels. The reality was totally different. There was a profusion of ranges and mountains that greeted us as we got close to the Alice, and the outcrops close to the highway got ever more impressive as we got closer. Alice itself lay among mountains in much the same way as Mt Isa.