Alice Springs
"Alice is a town that shouldn't work and does, entirely on its own terms."
The thing nobody tells you about Alice Springs is how much sky there is. I drove in from the east on the Stuart Highway at late afternoon, the Todd River dry and sandy on one side, the MacDonnell Ranges rising to the west in a wall of purple-red quartzite, and the sky occupying roughly eighty percent of my visual field. It felt less like arriving at a town and more like being repositioned on the planet. The light was horizontal and intensely amber, and it caught the ranges in a way that made them look painted rather than geological.
Alice Springs has a reputation that arrives before you do: the rough middle of Australia, the place between everywhere and everywhere else, the symbolic and geographic heart of the outback. The reality is more complicated and more interesting. It is a town of about 25,000 people that contains extraordinary Aboriginal art, difficult social realities, a serious food scene that emerged partly from isolation and partly from necessity, and a specific quality of horizontal light at the end of the day that I have not found anywhere else.
I spent two days in the eastern MacDonnell Ranges, which get less traffic than the western section and reward the extra effort. Trephina Gorge is a cut through white ghost gums and red quartzite where the afternoon light at four o’clock turns everything to amber. The creek bed runs white sand between vertical red walls, and the ghost gums root into the rock in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Ross River Homestead sits further east, a station turned simple accommodation where you can eat damper cooked in coals and watch wallabies come in at dusk from the surrounding scrub.
The art in Alice is worth your time seriously and specifically. Papunya Tula Artists on Todd Street is one of the places where the Western Desert art movement began in the early 1970s, when teachers began giving Aboriginal men from Papunya Western painting materials. The results changed Australian art permanently. Ikuntji Artists and the Araluen Arts Centre complete the circuit — the Aboriginal art here is not decorative curiosity. It carries cosmological knowledge in its dots and lines, and spending an hour with the galleries shifts the way you read the landscape outside.
The town itself is smaller and scrappier than you might expect from a place with such mythological weight. Todd Street Mall is the commercial strip; beyond it, the residential streets of Stuart Town hold corrugated iron buildings and bougainvillea and the occasional dog asleep on a driveway. In the evening I ate at a Turkish restaurant on Todd Street — I was not expecting this and it was good — and afterward I walked to the dry bed of the Todd River, which runs briefly perhaps three or four times a year and is otherwise a landscape of river red gums growing from white sand. Across the bank, a group of men had a fire going. The smoke went straight up. The sky above still held some colour from the sunset.
When to go: May through August. Winters in Alice are bright and cool — days around 20°C, nights near zero — and the light in the ranges is at its finest. Avoid January and February when the heat is genuinely dangerous and the flies become a full-time occupation.