Alice Springs

Round trip from Melbourne - 3.720 km/2,326 miles

The population of the Northern Territory of Australia is about 220,000 of whom more than half live in the capital, Darwin. The rest tend to live along the Stuart Highway that stretches some 2.800km (1,700 miles) from Darwin south to Port Augusta in South Australia.

27,000 of them live in Alice Springs, which is pretty much in the middle of Australia. It's 1.500km north to Darwin and about the same south to Adelaide. If you go east, it's 2.500km to Brisbane. Going west, you'd reach the Indian Ocean in around 1.500km, but there wouldn't be much to see when you got there. And you couldn't do it anyway because there isn't a road. So what I'm saying is, Alice is a remote place, right in the middle of the desert.

You can get there on the Ghan – Australia's “other” great train journey which runs from Adelaide to Darwin; it takes about 25 hours to do the run to Alice. Or you can drive it – Google suggests around 18 hours. Or you can fly in 3 hours. I flew.

Can I just reiterate here; Alice Springs is in the middle of a desert.

Here is my initial view of the airport:

You see, this is what happens when Scottish people travel places. You go half-way round the world, to the middle of a desert, and the rain's throwing it down...

My hotel was a little bit out of town, and public transport doesn't seem to exist in Alice, but there were bikes to be borrowed. Well, I was working on the principle that I was going to get wet anyway and I did have waterproof clothes with me and it wouldn't be the first time I've biked in the rain, so I borrowed a bike.

But where to go?

Not long before I left Amsterdam, I filled in a form to send back to my old GP in Edinburgh to re-register as a patient. When I called them to ask about the process, the receptionist carefully checked her map to ensure that my address was still in the area that they cover. It was.

If you live in the Outback, that question becomes a little academic. Of course you don't live in the practice area You may be hundreds of miles from the practice. But you might still get ill. Accidents happen. So what do you do?

Well, in 1928, the Presbyterian minister John Flynn decided to do something about it and set up what was to become the Royal Flying Doctors Service. In 1938, the Alice Springs base was established with a brief to cover an area of around 600km radius centred on the town. To save you the maths, that's 1.130.973 square kilometres (436,672 sq miles). By way of comparison, Great Britain has an area of 219.000 sq km. In other words, the RFDS in Alice Springs covers an area 5 times the size of GB. To be fair, the population of that area is about 36,000 people, but it's still quite a long way to make a house call.

During a tour of the Alice Base, we were shown a video describing the service and the meaning it has for the people who live in the Outback. Or rather, people who find themselves in the Outback because, of course, there are an increasing number of tourists who find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere. Australian citizens are covered on their national health system; visitors better hope they're insured or else they're going to get a rather large bill.

Obviously, the stories on the video were chosen for their impact but it was impossible to leave the room without a deep respect for the people who run the service. For example, one lady described how her baby was delivered at 28 weeks. As she put it, her daughter would never have survived were it not for the pilot and midwife who flew out into the desert to collect her and get her to Adelaide. One of the pilots summed it up, “people are always happy to see you”.

The service has been using Pilatus PC-12 aircraft since the mid 1990s. They offer a range of around 3.300 km and a ceiling of 30,000 feet. They allow the RFDS to offer their guarantee of arriving at any airstrip in their territory within 1½ hours of a doctor authorising the flight.

The interior is fully quipped as a first-aid centre, or it can have an incubator if needed. There's room for family members to come along too.

As well as the obvious emergency services, the RFDS also offers regular clinics in various locations – immunising children, for example, or offering general medical advice. Much of the work is actually done via radio or telephone calls. Doctors and nurses are available round the clock to offer advice, make diagnoses and even prescribe drugs. This last function became possible in 1942 when a standardised medical chest was introduced which could be bought by the owners of the outback stations. Here is part the chest as it was in 1958:

Included is a list of all the medicines in the chest:

It includes simple things like Aspirin, but also includes much stronger drugs marked “Doctor's orders only”. Each drug is numbered so that there is less possibility of mistake. Apparently the tale is apocryphal of one Outbacker who, when instructed to take two number 9 tablets but finding that he had run out of number 9, took two number 4's and two number 5's instead.

A pharmacist who happened to be visiting at the same time mentioned that several of the items in the 1958 box have now been banned! By 2008, the medical chest looked like this:

The day-to-day running costs of the service are largely met from charges to the national health system, or from other government grants, but Australian charity law prevents the government subsidising capital investments. With each aircraft costing $6 million, with a further $2 million for equipment, and a requirement that they have an active life of no more than 10 years, there is an ongoing fund-raising function. I noticed the little blue collecting cans in more than one shop in town, for example.

Having popped into the café and had the ubiquitous Australian pie, I set off once again into the rain on my borrowed bike which, by now, I was really wishing had mudguards:

My destination was the old Post and Telegraph office. This is where Alice Springs began – actually it's the entire raison d'être of the town, but more of that in a moment. On the way out of town, I noticed a sign pointing down a side street and immediately turned off.

It's not just doctors who operated over the air in the remote parts of Australia, teachers do too, though the "air" here refers to the airwaves not to aircraft. The Alice Springs School of the Air was set up in 1951 by a Miss Adelaide Miethke. She had heard of one of the Flying Doctor Service nurses giving a general talk on women's health over their radio network and it occurred to her that if nurses could do that, so could teachers.

Now the school has about 130 pupils, spread over a radius of well over 1000 km. Their boast is that they have “the largest classroom in the world”. It's more than twice the size of France, so they're probably right...

The original school operated using short-wave radios which could be unreliable in bad weather. Pupils' work was sent to them, and returned to the school, using the postal service; it took weeks or even months for work to be sent out, done, returned, marked and sent back to the pupils. These days, all the children get a satellite dish, computer, webcam, scanner and printer and are connected to the school on the internet.

The studio has several cameras allowing the teachers to demonstrate solutions or science experiments, or just to be visible to their students.

The open area in front of the desk is used for a variety of things, including PE classes.

The pupils have a local tutor – most often a parent, but occasionally a professional teacher. They also have their own webcams so that the teacher can see them. All the software is controlled by the teacher who can call up each pupil's camera as he wants. Pupils wanting to attract attention send a note via something akin to the IM software that all children seem to be addicted to these days.

Work is still posted out – a month's work at a time, including library books and other support material – but responses are emailed back allowing a much faster turnaround.

We heard of one pupil who lived 1200 km north of the school. One of her “classmates” lives 400 km south of the school – they're 1000 miles apart!

The children (and their families if possible) travel into the school 4 times a year to meet each other and to meet their teachers. One of these gatherings is used for the national testing programme, in which the school always performs very well. Another is used for sports day. Another is the end of year performance, though the rehearsals will have been conducted over the internet...

The school teaches children up to about the age of 14, after which they must go on to some other kind of school. Some board in Alice, others go to live with relatives all over the country to attend local schools there.

After visiting the school, it was time to get back out into the rain and continue my journey to the old Telegraph Station. Prior to 1858, messages for the Australian colonies would take at least 2 months to arrive by sea. The governor of the South Australian colony, Sir Richard MacDonnell, proposed building an overland telegraph line to the north coast and thence by undersea cable to Singapore and on to London through the existing Imperial telegraph service. The other (at the time independent) colonies were a bit suspicious of the idea but eventually put their weight behind it when South Australia offered to cover the whole of the expense of building the line.

The principle objection was whether it was even feasible to cross the Outback, but eventually the great Australian explorer John McDouall Stuart (Scottish, of course) mapped out a route. It fell to one Charles Todd, Postmaster General of South Australia, to actually plan the building of the line.

The telegraph line required regular repeater stations to boost the signal and one of these was planned for Alice Springs. The “spring” in the name isn't really a spring at all – it's a pool in the River Todd which holds water longer than most of the river because of a layer of impervious rock. It's named after Alice Todd – the Postmaster General's wife.

(Apologies for the white spot in the middle of the picture – I think it may be a rain drop)

The telegraph station is still there:

Inside, you can see the wires which transmitted the signals to and from Darwin and Adelaide (and, of course, further afield):

On the way back into town, I came across the only ford I've ever seen on a bike path:

I think it's fair to say that Alice Springs is better set up for hot weather than wet weather.

A couple of days later, I woke up to bright sunshine. It still wasn't warm, but at least it wasn't raining any more. Where there was water, was in the Todd River. This is marked as “usually dry” on maps of the town and it obviously is. Apparently local folklore has it that you aren't a proper native of Alice until you've seen the Todd flowing three times. Well, that makes me one-third a native:

I wonder how many points you get at the Australian Immigration Service for having seen the Todd flowing...

They take a rather casual approach to the river, it seems to me. Of the four river crossings in the town, two of them are fords and one of the remaining ones is very low. Oddly, despite most of the local vehicles being SUV's many with snorkels, the fords were closed even though I'm pretty sure I could have walked across without getting my knees wet:

I went looking for the historic centre of Alice Springs, but I'm afraid that, if it's there, I couldn't find it. The main street is just like any other small town main street – though there are rather more souvenir shops and most of the bars and cafés have managed to get “Outback” into their name somewhere. This:

was about as close as I could find. It originally opened as a hospital - the first in Central Australia - in 1926 but now does service as a local museum. The building took a practical approach to the problems of living in the intense heat of the Outback (ha! ha!) - wide roofs on the ground floor protected the windows from the sun and the walls are about 18” thick. The second storey acts as a chimney to let hot air escape.

Or perhaps this is what I was expecting – the Todd Tavern:

Alcohol is a sensitive subject in Alice Springs. There are restrictions on its sale and its consumption in public places such as streets or parks is banned. Off licences are only allowed to open for limited hours and the sale of wine is limited to one bottle per person per day. Whether the restrictions are having the desired effect I can't say.

Actually, getting back to the river, although it was clearly flowing while I was there, a bit of googling suggests that I hadn't really seen anything. Here is the Todd Tavern again in a picture taken in January 2010: