18th May - Alice Springs the day after Alan left

Alan managed to get his ticket sorted out with Tiger and he and I rode to the Airport to save on the taxi fare (which turned out to be $45 when I took a taxi the next day!)  Alan entrusted me to ride his beloved GS back to our digs and put it away in the container.  I must say that  I agree with Adolf - it is a bit of a tractor.  I stopped by at Chris' house as we hadn't finalised the arrangements for keys at the factory.  It was Sunday morning and she was reading in bed but kindly hopped up and we shared a coffee together.  She was reading a book about who Jesus Christ was and offered it to me.  We are keeping our keys and hope to stay a night in August when we get back. On the way from the airport I noticed a small solar farm with fancy tracking panels on pedestals.  There is another project called Iterne near the Ghan museum that I planned to visit later in the day.  First I had to ride the Beemer back to the factory and put it away with all of Alan's gear.  I then sorted out my stuff and packed a bag to take home. The first place I visited was the Telegraph Station.

This was called Alice Springs after the daughter of the first Telegraph Manager.  The nearby town was called Stuart, but eventually it had to be changed.  The Telegraph Station was a repeater station for the Overland Telegraph which stretched from London to Port Augusta and had several long undersea crossings.  It was completed in 1872 and was one of the engineering marvels of the age.  South Australia out maneuvered the other colonies to win the contract.  John Stuart successfully crossed the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin and surveyed the route.  It was this massive project that opened up central Australia and a series of repeater stations along the route developed into towns with Alice Springs being the biggest.

This is the actual Telegraph room and there was a morse code message being tapped out inside.  The station automatically repeated the message because it lost signal strength after about 300 miles.  The important job was to keep the huge batteries charged and maintain the equipment and the lines.  The skinny white pole carried the wires.There was quite a lot of electrical equipment and the telegraph was a complex system with lots of new inventions.

This is the actual telegraph wire - just a single wire on top of a wrought iron pole - for 3200 kms across the centre of Australia.  You can still find these poles in the bush today 140 years later. The station closed in 1932 and it was then used as a home for Aboriginal children stolen from their families as part of the disastrous policy to assimilate the Aborigine's by destroying their culture.  Many children lived here over the years until the 1960's.  One of the carers called Hatti Perkins was the mother of Charles Perkins who became Australia's first Aboriginal member of Federal Parliament.  The station was on the banks of the Todd River and there were a lot of locals enjoying a picnic and a bit of kick to kick.

The Todd River is just a dry sandy bed and once a year the Todd River Regatta is held in which teams compete in boats designed to be carried down the river bed.  If there happens to be rain and the river is flowing the regatta is cancelled!

I then rode up to the top of ANZAC Hill to get a view over the centre of town that I enjoyed in 1981 just to see how much had changed.

I wanted to revisit Alice Springs' first cemetery but when I got there, I heard the hoot of a train coming and I got to see a 1.8km long goods train with about 100 cars roll past on the way to Darwin.

The cemetery was opened in 1889 and had a few scattered headstones and fences and looked very peaceful.  There was a headstone for Fred Spicer who was the first occupant in 1889.  He was killed in an accident while inspecting a cattle station for Elders.

 I then headed off to see the Ghan Museum at the old Stuart Station, which was on the outskirts of the present Alice Springs.  It had heaps of memorabilia and the last engine with a couple of carriages were parked outside.  

The old Ghan ran its last service in 1980 and there was a documentary on the railway at the museum.  My sister Sheila traveled on it when she visited Australia in 1969.  They said that if the train arrived on the correct day that was a good service such were the delays due to track damage.  The original route had to follow the watercourses to supply water for the steam engines and the floods would wash the line away at regular intervals.  In fact they carried a few spare lengths of track on the train for just this eventuality!  In 1980 it was then replaced with a modern line 160 kms to the west and in 2004 this was extended to Darwin. 

 Round the back of the train I found a camel happily grazing.  The camels were here before the Ghan and survived the old one at least.  The name Ghan is short for Afghan in reference to the Afghan cameleers who were the only form of transport before the railways came.

I finished off going back to Anzac Hill to see the sunset.  That night was probably the poorest sunset of our entire trip with not even a slight reddening of the sky.  I fell into conversation with three guys from Darwin who had been attending the AGM.  They were returning the next day on two BMW 1600 GTL's and R1200 S;  about $100k worth of motorcycles!  My little DR650 looked very cheap indeed beside these behemoths.  There were also several NSITS on the hill and they made up for the poor sunset.