Alice Springs is a town situated in the heart of the continent of Australia, centred in the lower third of the Northern Territory. It is the third-largest town popularly known as “the Alice” or simply “Alice”, Alice Springs. The surrounding countryside, “the centre” as Australians call it, is parched. The lakes and rivers are dry for most of the time and the cattlemen on the few homesteads depend on water pumped from bores hundreds of feet deep.
The town of Alice Springs was founded in the middle of the 19th Century after the discovery of a sheltered, watered plain among the MacDonnell Ranges, a series of hills which ripple for 250 miles across the land. By 1872 a telegraph station had been built at a water hole beneath a rocky hill. The area is known as Mparntwe to its original inhabitants, the Arrernte, who have lived in the Central Australian desert in and around what is now Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years.
The name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd (née Alice Gillam Bell), wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. Next came prospectors looking for gold. They left a ghost town at Arltunga not far from Alice. Once, back in 1880, they thought they had found rubies by the million, but the gems proved to be cheap garnets, not worth transporting. Cattlemen soon followed, for much of “the Centre” is marginal land that provides good feed when it rains. They knew the rains did not come often, but felt one good season could carry five bad seasons. Often it has had to carry seven or eight bad ones.
The growth of Alice Springs in recent years has astonished everybody. The railroad linked to it Adelaide in 1939 when its population was less than 100. By the Second World War 1,000 people lived there. It was used as a military base after the Japanese bombed Darwin. Stuart Highway—still called simply “the bitumen”—was completed from Darwin to Alice, a distance of 954 miles.
