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October 8,
2000 ALICE SPRINGS, Australia - The movable dinner show was lively, starring unrehearsed native dancers doing the ageless, elemental 'Roo Hop.
"It's the original hip-hop," applauds my friend and spectating tablemate, Aurelio. "Pre-dating civilization by eons."
Only in Australia. As a splendid train called The Ghan sped through the Outback and into twilight, a chorus line of kangaroos pogoed alongside, presenting their routine for the passengers. We were in the dining car, and a steward, Brian May, delivered the entrees with a cheery, "A double helping of kangaroo. On your plate and outside the window."
Aurelio said, "If this hops off the plate, I'm sending it back." Remaining immobile, the entree was good. Beefy, rare, and moist. However, for local cuisine she prefers the big bird, emu, supposedly the healthiest of all meats, very low in cholesterol.
Steward May said that kangaroos like to come out of seclusion at dusk.
"Not like mad dogs and us Englishmen . . . out in the noonday sun," said another sharing the table, Chris Paparesti, a Briton in shorts and singlet from Newcastle. Identified by his tattooed bicep as a fan of the Newcastle United soccer team, he said, "If our team could move like those kangaroos, we'd never lose."
Sunset, spectacularly tinting the clouds in peach, purple, lilac, pink, cerise, salmon, and scarlet was a prelude to the curtain of darkness coming down on the 'Roo Revue.
Australia is a good country for railroads, a way of travel I much prefer to airplanes. This train was named The Ghan as a tribute to the imported Afghan camel drivers whose caravans were the only reliable means of getting around in the Outback for a long time. Begun in 1877, the line was a joke of bizarre planning for years. It kept getting washed out because the right of way was in the wrong places. But now it covers 1,500 miles from Melbourne through Adelaide to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory at the heart of the country.
We boarded one of the silver coaches at mid-afternoon in Adelaide, South Australia, to be greeted by a jovial, middle-aged conductor, Murray Ingersoll.
"It is an old train but a very good one," he said, accurately and proudly, escorting us to a compartment with two bunks, wash basin, shower, and toilet. He wore a coat and tie, but passenger garb was generally shorts, T-shirts, and sandals.
The countryside was laid out in dusky browns and greens, interrupted by salt lakes, occasional tiny towns, forests of fingery trees, a low mountain rampart called the Flinders Range. The overseer, an azure sky, was brushed by careless lightweight clouds. Once out of Adelaide, there was only one city preceding the loneliness of the Outback: Port Augusta, on Spencer Gulf that leads to the Southern Ocean. Aborigine children were leaping gaily from a railroad bridge to swim in the Gulf. The aged yellow concrete station offered murals of the muscle-straining workers - doing "hard yakka," as it's said - in early days of the last century: cattlemen, camel drivers, sheep shearers, track layers.
"You should get up for the sunrise," advised Ingersoll, bidding us goodnight. "They can be brilliant out here." At 6:30 a.m. he was at the door with tea and biscuits, and the sun wasn't far behind although the sky was as ruddy as a canyon wall. An insistent glow on the horizon, seeming a distant city ablaze, became a golden haze as the sun strained to get loose from the clutches of wild grass and reveal itself as a great ball of fire.
Intimidated cattle hid from it among pointy trees that resembled ranks of green-uniformed soldiers. Small balls of fire, fried eggs staring up, were a nice breakfast accompaniment. The earth was red, too, rising in hills, then mesas that might have been smuggled in from New Mexico. The Ghan pulled into Alice at 9 a.m. Ingersoll, greeting several acquaintances on the platform, said the train would turn around, get reprovisioned, and head back to Adelaide in a few hours. He was a highlight of a fine journey.
Alice, though isolated, is no longer the frontier town I remember. Those memories are 20 years old. Grown to 27,000 as the gateway to Ayers Rock, it has good hotels like Lasseters and good restaurants like Red Ochre. There's enough to see in and around town to keep transients occupied for a couple of days.
Aborigines are plentiful, mysterious, keeping to themselves, often barefoot. Having suffered discrimination, abuse, and slaughter, not unlike American Indians, incredibly they weren't granted citizenship until 1967. They like to gather in small clusters, shaded by very old gums in the dry bed of the Todd River.
Sometimes the Todd floods. But the annual "boat race" is usually conducted by crews on the run, their legs protruding from the bottom of rowboats.
Just outside of town, all sorts of Outback creatures populate the fascinating Desert Park, feeling right at home in habitats duplicating what they're accustomed to throughout the Northern Territory. If it flies, swims, skitters, or creeps, they've got it here.
Emus are the best dads, says a park ranger. "They hatch the eggs and raise the kids while the moms are gallivanting." He says this is the world ant capital. "We've got 'em all."
Bird calls flood the air. Willy wagtails are swishing their dark-feathered posteriors like hula dancers. Black-faced wood swallows, seeming fugitives from an avian minstrel show, dart about dining on insects. Crimson chats, as bright as their name implies, scream, "Tsee! Tsee!" wanting to be seen. A water hole is crowded with ducks, grebes, coolibahs, herons, orange chats, and a banded lapwing whose front looks like a tuxedo. Rooming in the darkened nocturnal house are lizards, skinks, spotted cats called quolls, midget foxes called kowaris, various snakes.
On the honor system, birds of prey that like to hang out in the neighborhood - wedge-tailed eagles, buzzards, and vultures - put on a compelling spectator show of finding, fetching, and feeding. Riding thermals way up high, the house eagles, the country's largest flying hunters, spot a victim, often a rabbit. Flapping wings that spread seven feet, one dive-bombs into a small arena for lunch and dinner.
"They wing for their supper," says Aurelio.
"They could fly away, of course," says a keeper, Davide Costanzo, "but they like the tucker [food] we have for them regularly. So they stick around and perform for us, and we think they like the applause. Two shows a day." Real troupers. Show biz, Outback style.
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