Culture Shock

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Today we’ll be slogging an arduous nearly 700 kms north into the Northern Territory and onto Alice Springs.

We stop to get a caffeine fix and stretch our legs at the thriving metropolis of Marla, population 38. It might be small, but the roadhouse supermarket wouldn’t look out of place in a Melbourne suburb. There’s not much you can’t get here - food for both pets and humans, toiletries, clothes, and even tools to fix your caravan. There’s no mobile reception, but they’ve got that covered too - three phone boxes lined up next to each other out the front. I wonder if many of the younger generation would even know what one of these things was.

I get chatting to the two young service staff, she’s from Spain and he’s from Ireland. There do seem to be lots of people from far flung parts of the world working in service industries out here in the middle of nowhere. Last night’s chef was from Sri Lanka, the Coober Pedy hotel receptionist and one of the waiters were German, and the girl who was responsible for cleaning our room was Filipino. The young lady who gave us the opal polishing demonstration yesterday was fresh off the plane from Sicily. She apologised that she was very nervous, as this was the first time she’d done the demonstration. I can only assume it must be really hard to find people to work in service industries out here, and therefore presumably a strong reliance on itinerant tourists. We’re suffering from culture shock out here, and we’re Aussies. I’d hate to think what it must be like for any of this lot. They’ve come from crowded countries where English isn’t the first language (I guess they speak a sort of English in Ireland) to one of the most isolated regions on the entire planet, where the English dialect spoken probably bears only a passing resemblance to anything they might have learnt at school; frightening I’m sure.

The half of the world’s fly population that wasn’t out at the Breakaways last night is here, and they’re crawling into every available orifice - eyes, noses and ears. Issy says she wants to buy one of those wide brimmed hats with corks hanging off it; the ones they use to make fun of us Aussies in the movies - just to be clear, the vast majority of us don’t actually wear them, just in case you were wondering. The supermarket doesn’t seem to stock any, so we settle for some nets that we can put over our hats, pull down over our faces and tie around our necks, hopefully not too tightly - it’d be shame to keep the flies out only to die of strangulation.

The supermarket might look like a haven for weary travellers but we suspect all is not always well here. There’s a sign on the door telling us that no more than four people are allowed inside at any one time after dark. Hmmm. We can only assume this is due to an extension of the civil unrest among our indigenous folk from further north. We heard stories of this in Coober Pedy as well, indigenous folk from out of town roaming the streets at night smashing things up. The locals were at pains to point out that this wasn’t “their” indigenous folk, who they said generally live in very peaceful coexistence with their non-indigenous neighbours. All very sad.

It’s long drive, so my underoccupied mind searches for meaningful things to think about. I struggled with this a bit, so intelligent readers might want to skip forward a paragraph or so. There are signs at very regular intervals along the road, usually no more than about twenty kilometres, warning motorists to look out for kangaroos and cattle from unfenced cattle stations wandering out onto the road. I’ve never been quite sure what these signs are meant to achieve, a bit like signs warning you to beware of rocks falling onto your car. Presumably you’re not going to drive more slowly, and most of us drivers are already concentrating pretty hard on what’s ahead of and around us. And why are the signs so frequent; do they perhaps assume we’ve all got really short memories? As soon as we cross the border into the Northern Territory the frequency of the signs drops away to virtually zero. I’m sure there aren’t any fewer large mammals to run into up here, in fact there are probably more if you add in camels, donkeys and water buffalo, and if you go far enough north you might even come across the odd croc on the bitumen. Maybe Northern Territory drivers have got better memories, or perhaps they’re just better at driving generally. That must be it; they’ll let us hare along at 130 kms per hour as soon as we cross the border; the limit was only a paltry 110 back in South Australia. All very mysterious.

Another feature of the roadside landscape is abandoned cars, often stripped, burnt out, draped in graffiti and lying on their rooves. We’re not quite sure why; damaged vehicles too expensive to tow long distances possibly?

First stop in the Territory is the roadhouse at yet another thriving metropolis, this time Kulgera, population 50 (in 2006, I guess it might be bigger now …. or smaller). It’s ridiculously quirky. There’s a hills hoist out the front draped with pairs of shoes, and a vast array of bras and other miscellaneous paraphernalia (but mainly bras) hanging from the ceiling of the bar.

The landscape‘s been flattish with sparshish vegetation seemingly for days now, but that changes quite dramatically as soon as we cross the border - large rocky outcrops, hills that could almost pass as mountains, greener vegetation, substantial gum trees, and we even see some water pooled in sandy creek beds - we haven’t seen any of that since we left Port Augusta.

Our AirBnb is a few kilometres south of town and has a large balcony overlooking the Todd River … although I think they might use the term “river” fairly loosely in these parts - we suspect it might have been a while since it last had any water in it. It’s all very pleasant nonetheless.

They seem to be taking the whole civil unrest thing here fairly seriously. We head into the supermarket in search of alcohol, but it seems it’s now only available for sale between 3 and 6pm, Wednesday to Friday. Whatever they’re doing we hope it’s working. From what we’d been led to believe, even leaving the car in the car park unattended was a brave move.

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