Day Ten

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Hi all, love your messages, keep em coming. Hey Craig, everyone else can see our fab photos. I thought u were a technical wizard like Doc, perhaps i was wrong? Today started at the Alice Springs Desert Park. It's like a big garden divided into seperate desert areas, river, sand and woodlands. We saw an amazing bird show with millenium falcons, magpies, a boo book owl and black kites. Fab. Amazing avaries and an incredible nocturnal house. All the animals in there were awake and seemed to be putting on their own show for us. A king brown was climbing a tree, a bilby was just running and running, geckoes, snakes, bats, hopping mice, malas thorny devils, tawny frogmouths, just to name a few. It was hot though. We all seem to be tired. We each had our own audio guides and could hear stories about every area that we were in. The flowers were incredible, stuart peas, spinifex, i could go on but i won't. Then another souvenir shop and home to camp for lunch. AND THEN....... We seemed to move states. It seemed almost Queenslandish. Hot steamy, gale force winds and teeming rain. We waited and watched it come and almost go. As we were watching the clouds come in Jack has the quote of the day, " I reckon this will pass over us" Incorrect Jack Martin. It bucketed and bucketed and bucketed. We headed off to our next destination, the School of the Air, only to be greeted by trees down everywhere. It was like we had been hit by a cyclone. Traffic lights out, power lines down, massive gums over roads, over parked cars, shade sails over new cars in car yards were torn from their anchors. Quite surreal really. It bought out the best and worst in everyone. The school of the air had no power so that was the end of that for today. Headed back to town. Drove past a shanty town, horrid really. Rivers/creeks actually running. Locals playing in them! More tree damage all around. We've never seen anything like it. The sky was pink, like a massive dust storm. Eerie. Ended back at camp and jac and i decided to do our own bit of exploring . Jac can continue......

Alright then. How do I explain the sadness and hopelessness of the Aboriginal people up here? Its hard. Joe was so excited to be coming to a place where he could meet Aboriginal people, kick the footy with them, learn more about them. So far, we have seen no role models at all. Once the power had gone out today, there were Aboriginal people everywhere on the street, hapless a lot of them, unable to get into the pubs. I don't know if these comments are appropriate for a blog, but do we just ignore this problem? Its definitely a complex problem. We have seen the opposite poles of the Indigenous plight, the Aboriginal Education campus and, a few hundred metres away, depressing, shanty type bomb sites. Heavy......

We saw the Todd river run today. Bron and I even drove through it. Plenty of people out taking photos of the flow and some kids playing in the mud and the water. Then we went to the only shop in town that was open, had power

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Comments

[lisaaa]

hiii
that photo is it rohan? it looks like fatttyy anthony haha emily said it was rohaan but i just figured out it's at daniel's 16th by the way if you didn't already know Molly, Lorranie, Mary and Daniel are at kyneton, excluding anthony due to work. loooooove lis