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March 20, 2004
Ten hours and 903 kilometers
Ten hours and 903 kilometers after leaving Daly Waters we arrived, dry and dusty, in Alice Springs, a grid of ruler-straight streets set alike an enormous helipad on a plain beside the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges. Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle - an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names - and for a long time it was a sort of antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954, Alice's only regular connection on to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts, and whatever else couldn't be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded.
In those days Alice had a population of 4000 and hardly any visitors. Today it's a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors - 350,000 of them a year - which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The town has not only become accessible, it's become a destination. It's so full of motels, conference centers, campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can't pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It's crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who now come to see how remote it no longer is.
Nearly all guidebooks and travel articles indulge the gentle conceit that Alice retains some irreproducible outback charm - some away-from-it-all quality that you must come here to see - but in fact it is Anywhere, Australia. Actually, it is Anywhere, Planet Earth. On our way into town we passed strip malls, car dealerships, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, banks, and gas stations. Only a scattering of Aborigines strolling among the dried bed of the Todd River gave any hint of exoticism. We took rooms in a motor inn on the edge of the modest downtown. My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond - or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a Kmart plaza across the road. In the 2 million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don't suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition.
Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later when we met out front he was staring at the same scene. "I can't believe we've just driven a thousand miles to find a Kmart," he said. He looked at me. "You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know."
I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is totally without aesthetics and totally irresistible. And now we box these places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn't know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn't see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I daresay, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in.
Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country
Posted by Kristin at March 20, 2004 8:18 AM