The Reverend F. W. Albrecht lay propped up beside his wife on the floor of the Mission truck. Half a dozen natives sat watching an injured girl of about twelve. She had fallen from a swing, and internal trouble was suspected. She lay on a mattress, with blankets, sheets, and pillow. Someone else was going in for dental attention, and members of the Mission Board had completed their active inspection of Hermannsburg and its outposts.
At Jay Creek I said good-bye to them all, and left the truck. Mr and Mrs Ringwood wanted me to stay the night at least; but I moved off across Jay Creek towards the hills, and turned towards the sunset gleaming on Mount Conway, which stood up prominently as the main peak amongst its rugged group. I did not know then that an old native, almost exhausted and breathless, was telling Mr Ringwood of his great worry at ‘poor ol’ feller go walkabout wrong way for Alice Spring – me go catchem horse – fetchem back!’ But Mr Ringwood managed to persuade the old warrior that I was walking on a planned though roundabout route.
I camped beside a shallow sandy gully, and continued at break of day, up beside a running stream of mineralized water that smelt; up into the vivid red of Standly Chasm, ten feet wide, several hundred feet deep, smooth-walled, with bright shadows and towers of red and pink rock jutting up to the north, framed by the walls of the chasm. I went slowly through, then up into the little Standly Chasm, higher and higher, up and on over smooth worn boulders, through crevice, crack, hole and cavern, and out into the sunlight of a suspended valley running east and west. From the higher crests above that again, some time later, I looked back and down the Standly watercourse and across the parallel ranges to the Missionary Plain a long way south. The chasm had been named in honour of Mrs Standly, a past Alice Springs schoolmistress, who taught white children and many brown children. Originally the lower end of the chasm had been known as Gall’s Springs, after Charles Gall, of Owen Springs Station, south-west across the Missionary plain at the base of the Waterhouse Range.
The Macdonnell Ranges about Standly Chasm have kinked out of line into a wrangle of peaks and ravines. I went back through the Standly, and then eastward along the rough base of a red crumbling range. There were terraces, broken cliffs, narrow canyons and caves up to the left, and every few hundred yards a rocky gully emerged to cross the mulga plain before joining a main watercourse down towards Jay Creek Depot. Rough razorbacks of vertical sandstone jutted up sharply. They were piled on edge in long bows up to a furlong in length, rising from nothing up to fifty feet above the surroundings, continuing along the valley like the scaly back fins of a great dragon. An oncoming cold made hard work of the rough going, and the load was well over fifty pounds in weight with cameras and water-bottles. Jay Creek meandered down out of the main ranges several miles ahead. I set a course across rough low ridges to intercept it, and at sundown reached the Jay Creek Fish Hole, a favourite hunting and camping spot, and painting ground of Albert Namatjira. The deep red so common in the ranges had given way to granite walls of light pink, grey, and banded grey and white, about a deep clear pool. There were no birds, and the silence was strange and eerie. A sleepless night with a temperature of 102, and a packet of aspirin did not break the cold; and at daylight I put on double clothing to induce perspiration, and headed away slowly and shakily at first, up through Jay Gorge, and out onto rocky country to northward, and then east along an east and west valley through brittle bushes and dead trees. The cold came out in sweats and grunts. After about ten miles the ranges commenced to break up; and an old track led south-east through a low gap in which there was a small spring. A large euro attempted to escape up a broken cliff, turned again and shot past at full speed, then paused on a ridge silhouetted against the sky and snorted loud defiance. I found out later that the place was known as Spring Gap, the head of the Roe River, which I followed, scrambling across its many bends and over the intervening spinifex ridges, which seemed interminable. The high northern face and peak of Mount Gillen was a good guide, and the walk to it straight but tough and rough, hour after hour. A third pair of heavy brogue shoes in a few days of hard walking were falling to bits. The way led on through a wide valley of vertical bands of stone, horizontal bands, tilted stone, curved stone, and immense piles of slabs without order. I passed by the deep shadows of crumbling mountains about Simpson’s Gap, and on into Alice Springs to end a tiring forty-mile walk for the day.
The cold had broken up completely.
It was good to see the Alice again, and enjoy a hot bath and lie flat out on a soft bed and stretch away. Old Gran the cook had to have her ‘pitcher’ taken, with four pet Moloch horridus lizards suspended like a necklace on her ample bosom; and several dear old souls newly arrived from Adelaide wanted to know ‘all about the Macdonnells’; whether they would be able to walk through the ranges. And were the savages really wild? And had I a gun? Goodness! Why didn’t I carry one? Were the missionaries exploiting the natives? And did Albert Namatjira do his own paintings or were they done for him? Could they get a pet kangaroo somewhere? And, perhaps best of all, almost word for word: ‘Where might one purchase aboriginal weapons? My husband is most vitally interested in the aboriginal question. He already has several boomerangs and spears from the Nullarbor Plain, and is particularly anxious to get a big collection before these unfortunate people are allowed to die out. I do hope the authorities really do something about it all.’
The Adelaide business-man told me of the cornet-player, and how several worried people had entrained him for Adelaide. He had played a departing ‘Alice, Where Art Thou?’ as the train pulled slowly away from the platform; but the cornet-player had travelled only a few hours before bursting into tears. He left the train fifty miles down the line and persuaded a trolley-man to cycle him back; and Alice Springs had wakened to his wailing trumpet up on Billy Goat Hill just before daylight.
Then two Melbourne business-men with English wives drove into town, and went rabbit-shooting to Simpson’s Gap, twelve miles to the west of the town. The women brought in two badly mutilated rabbits at dusk, and went through the dark interior of the hotel, calling: ‘Chef! Chef! I say, Chef! Where are you?’ A bleary individual stood before them. ‘Oo y’ lookin’ for, the berlanky cook?’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t call the silly ol’ beggar “Chef”. ’Taint a ’im; it’s a ’er; and jus’ call ’er “Gran” – see!’ Eventually they located Gran, who glared at the rabbits. ‘I say – Cook,’ one of the ladies said. ‘Do you prepare rabbits?’ Gran’s reply was very slow. ‘Hmph! How do you like ’em? Baked, boiled, or just plain bloody like you’re givin’ ’em to me?’
Alice Springs has a certain amount of modern night life. Some of the cafés keep open until well past midnight. People who set out to travel in from places hundreds of miles out often arrive in the early hours of the morning, cold and hungry in winter, hot and thirsty in summer. The sandwich bar had a temporary girl who stomped about heavily from the hips down and threw her arms round like a body bowler in action. ‘What’ll yez all ’ave?’ she asked, while she chewed rapidly, leant on our table, and crossed her hefty legs.
‘Ham and eggs!’ We all ordered the same. At the next table a reveller had fallen asleep with his bearded face sideways, resting gently on a plate of steak and eggs.
She went away, returned, took up the same position, and quickly informed us: ‘They haint no heggs for none o’ yez. Yez’ll ’ave to ’ave ’am with somethin’ helse. What’ll yez ’ave?’
She kept on glaring at us at intervals over the modern counter. She did not like our laughter; and we were annoyed to see the tough-looking guy with his face bogged in two eggs. We got out before he lifted his face from the plate.
I stood before Simpson’s Gap, slashing several hundred feet down to sever the high red range to its base. The place was beautiful; and from a bank of sand I saw not so much the grandeur of it all, but empty beer-bottles in shallow water fouled by stock, empty tins, and a gallery of names painted in large white lettering on the smooth red rock. A white ghost gum had been shot at. It was all evidence of vandalism – following upon road access from Alice Springs.
I walked out to Emily Gap, six miles east of the town, crossing the golf-course en route, set out on sandy clay-pans. The aboriginal totemic rock paintings are prominent well inside the gap, and so far no one has mutilated them. They were painted well before the coming of the white man, and look as though they will remain for centuries as an important relic of the native ceremonies for which the gap was once famous. Several hundred feet up on the western side of the gap, large caves, reputedly holding the spirit bodies of the dead, look out to massive red walls less than fifty yards opposite. I climbed up. The rock was smooth and polished by thousands of native feet, and the soft feet of scurrying rock wallabies. It was easy to see these rock wallabies from any high point, as they emerged timidly, one by one, from dark cracks, to sniff and peer for the suspected stranger scrambling about their cliff haunts. The range on both sides of the gap is about a quarter of a mile through at the base, several hundred feet high, with flat plains dotted with mulga and watercourse gums to north and south of it. I went striding and hopping from rock to rock in the spinifex along its crest; it was like moving on top of a giant wall separating two worlds of North and South. To north-west, Alice Springs straddled the Todd River, with roofs and tall trees in mottled white and dark green. A large plane droned up from the south over unlimited space and distant low hills. It landed at the modern landing field, glistening silver against the sun, refuelled in a hurry, rose, circled, and came straight towards me on that narrow wall, which seemed to be marching across a continent. Within a few minutes the plane had vanished towards Darwin, nearly a thousand miles beyond the rim of low, irregular hills to northward.