Alice Springs

We visited the old Telegraph office and Botanic Garden today. 2  outings a day is about all we can enjoy, otherwise the places get all muddled up. It means we leave this lovely isolated city of 25,000 without seeing everything on offer.

The botanic gardens were interesting and seemed to display  the plants in their natural rugged environment well. I found the leaves fascinating, how they resist the harsh climate.

The reason Alice Springs developed in the 1800s was as an integral part of the overland telegraph system. Prior to this it took months if not years for messages to reach Europe. The Europeans built their little establishment next to this waterhole on the Todd River. This was unfortunate for the local indigenous people who had been settled here for many thousands of years. In the 1900s the church and government decided to remove the Aboriginal children who had both black and white parents. This continued until the 1950s, it is known as the stolen generation. The children were taken as far away as the Blue Mountains in NSW and Melville Island north of Darwin. Many never saw their family again. SHAME. 

The settlers had supplies come just once a year by camel. The land is too isolated for horses and camel trains were the main transport until the rail line came up from Adelaide. The rail to Darwin was envisioned in 1911 and completed in 2003. The first was narrow gauge to Alice and then a wider gauge was built. It was closed for 25 days earlier this year when there were bad floods in South Australia.