Outback’s Harsh Terrain “Worn to its bones by millions of years of erosion. . .”

Six-year-old Pearl Powell found a harsh and desolate wasteland when she arrived in the outback in 1917. The journey from Adelaide had taken two weeks--three days by train to Oodnadatta and the rest of the way by horse and wagon. “Wasn’t it a traumatic experience for such a little girl?” I asked as we sipped billy tea in a billabong a few miles outside Alice Springs, the Northern Territory’s best-known town. Hungrily, I awaited her reply, certain she was going to tell of death-defying escapes from the aborigines and of nearly perishing of thirst in a scorched, forbidding wilderness. “For us children it was just one big picnic, one big adventure,” Powell said with a smile. “I remember the first night out from Oodnadatta. We camped out and the men put up a tent. We slept on mattresses and heard dingos crying in the distance.”

“Didn’t that scare you?”

“No, not really,” she said. “Mum said that it was only wild dogs having a fight or something. We didn’t take that much notice.”

So much for terrifying encounters.

We were chatting with Powell in a picture-post card setting at the Wiggly Waterhole, a billabong where she drove cattle as a youngster and romped with her brothers on the gentle red slopes of the dried-up Todd River bed. Our camp was in a green, wooded area of mulga scrub and ghost gum, a eucalypt typical of the Northern Territory’s Red Centre. The tree is so named because its stark white trunk and boughs appear ghostly on a moonlit night.

Rains Bring Color

Spring in the outback had been unusually wet, the wettest in a good 20 years. After the heavy rains the red and harsh terrain had burst into a mosaic of color, bringing forth the spinifex grass and wildflowers in grand and glorious profusion.

Even the birds were joining in the floral celebration, chattering and twittering above us like winged welcoming committees--birds like the yellowish little corellas that rest in the river gums of inland watercourses; the mulga parrot, which resembles a parakeet, and the noisy galah (ga-LAW), a pink-bodied, white-tufted, gray-winged parrot that can be taught to say a few words.

Powell, a sturdy woman of 76 with brown hair almost untouched by gray, rose from her camp chair and pointed to a bough overhead. “There’s a galah now,” she said.

A Billy of Water

Our companion and guide, Geoff Purdie, had built our campfire and hung a billy of water over it to boil tea. Billy tea, as any fair dinkum Aussie will tell you, is made by boiling the water once, removing it and placing it back over the fire after the tea leaves have been added.

“I put gum leaves in this,” Purdie said. “After it boils again, you swing the can around your head and that makes the tea leaves go to the bottom.”

This is the real Australia, I thought, reminiscent of the “Jolly Swagman” of song, who camped by a billabong and “sang as he watched and waited while his billy boiled.”

The small and ubiquitous outback flies were out in force, flitting about the face and ears. They’re more cantankerous than carnivorous. We had no cause, however, to chase the pests away with the famed “Australian salute”--a waving of the hand in front of the face in a casual, unmilitary fashion. A fly repellent we had bought at an Alice Springs pharmacy, plus Geoff’s bush hats with corks dangling from the brim, did the job.

This setting, this come-to-life painting by Namatjira, was a perfect forum for Powell to continue her tales of this austere land, this countryside that Australian author and former United Press International correspondent Robert Wilson said is “worn to its bones by millions of years of erosion.”

Despite Pearl’s fairly unaffected approach to the rigors of those pioneer days, I had a feeling that life in the outback must have been less than one big picnic for her . . . much less.

Sent to Isolated Town

Her father, Frederick Alfred Price, had been sent from Adelaide in 1916 to become postmaster/manager of the isolated telegraph station at Alice Springs (not the present town, but the original water hole named for the wife of South Australia’s superintendent of telegraphs). His family arrived the following March.

The station, which had been established as a fort to counter attacks by aborigines, was staffed by a station master, assistant and four linemen, and had become the “capital” of this vast land, after the construction of the 3,000-kilometer overland telegraph line between Port Augusta and Darwin in 1872. But the local natives, the Aranda, proved to be a friendly people.

Price was more fortunate than some of his predecessors, however. In the summer of 1872 three telegraph station managers traveling north to take over the stations at Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs found that the environment was cruel, unrelenting. One of them died of thirst and the others survived only by turning back and drinking the blood of their horses.

Even as late as 1926 the white population of Alice Springs (then called Stuart) had reached only 40.

“But it was still kind of a wild existence, wasn’t it, after you came?” I asked Powell.

“Well, I suppose you could call it wild,” she said, “but everyone lived that way. We were all pioneers. We didn’t have any schools; we were self-taught. Mum taught us the basic things. A sister helped in the kitchen, but my brothers and myself--we ran wild.

“I was the ringleader, a tomboy. I’d climb a tree and they’d have to follow me. Well, believe it or not, those were telephone poles I climbed. And I got to the top of them.”

In the years immediately after the completion of the telegraph line the aborigines also got to the top of the poles, breaking the porcelain insulators to provide themselves with spearheads and scraping tools. It’s no wonder, I thought, that the aborigines resented--and resisted--the intrusion of the white man.

This land that had been theirs for 40,000 years was being taken from them in much the same manner that the American settlers and Army took over the lands from the native Americans.

“There were no problems with the aborigines when you were a child?”

Natives Were Friendly

“We played with them,” Powell said. “They were good. We didn’t call them aborigines--in those days they were called natives. And the old native folks looked after us. We used to speak like we’re speaking now. There was no pidgin English.

“We had lubas-- native women--to help mum. We used to do stock work, cattle work like muster the cattle and horses on dad’s farm, because there were no people here during the war years. And they couldn’t get help.

“Supplies came from Adelaide twice a year then, brought by camel train. It was an exciting day when the supplies came in, because it was bulk. But it was so long on the road that a lot of the stuff got spoiled. Bugs got into it.”

Even today, when temperatures in this area reach 120 degrees and higher, the heat of the outback summer is oppressive.

“Did you ever get used to it?” I asked.

“We grew up in it,” Pearl said. “We covered up for the sun the same as you cover up for the cold.”

On at least one occasion for those early settlers, the heat could be an asset.

“Like a packet of flour from the shop that’s got weevils in it,” Pearl continued, alternating between the past and present tenses as she spoke. “What’d they do? They’d throw it away. But what you would do is spread a sheet out in the hot sun and put your flour there and all of a sudden you see all the weevils are gone. They didn’t like the heat. So you scoop up that flour and put it through a sieve and use it. It doesn’t taste any different. It doesn’t hurt you.

“Sometimes you’d miss a few of them and they’d turn up in the cooking. Well, that was ‘caraway seed,’ ” she said with a laugh.

But there were no weevils in the self-rising flour that Purdie was mixing with salt and water in a shallow iron pot. He scooped a six-inch hole in the dry, sandy creek bed and lined it with hot coals from the fire, then put the covered pot of rounded dough on top of the coals and heaped more hot embers on top.

And before you could sing three choruses of “Waltzing Matilda,” we had huge slices of damper, the solid and staple bush bread of the old outback prospectors, smothered in honey.

Once in a while, Powell said, visitors would turn up at the telegraph station--swagmen, doggers, stockmen. “They mostly came on horses or camels or mules. They told lovely stories, those old men. They wore old clothes, but they were clean.

“They’d go prospecting and kill dingos. The government wanted to get rid of the dingos because they were killing sheep. (The doggers) would take the ears off the dingos and get 2 and 6 from the government (2 shillings, 6 pence--about 25 cents).”

Ranch Work

After her father died in 1924, Powell worked on cattle and sheep stations, putting the jumbucks (sheep) on a train at Adelaide bound for Oodnadatta, for example, and then driving them over the long haul from Oodnadatta to Alice.

She married twice--a young stockman named Bird and a motor mechanic named Powell--and was widowed twice. Four children came from the first marriage.

Still active and spry, she volunteers as hostess every Thursday at Adelaide House, Alice Springs’ oldest hospital, and assists on tours into the outback. And if you should ask, she’ll tell you quietly about the old telegraph station and the dingos and the doggers and the old swagmen who told such lovely stories.

She’s not a bit of a galah, this Powell.

Before a narrow-gauge rail line was extended in 1929 from Oodnadatta to Stuart (the town became Alice Springs in 1933), camel trains led by Afghans were used to transport freight and passengers over the route, a laborious trip that took up to eight weeks for people like Powell and other pioneers of the Outback.

We made the journey on a new, standard-gauge rail route from Adelaide to Alice in 23 hours aboard the deluxe, air-conditioned Ghan train, named for those hardy Afghan cameleers of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Instead of having to camp every night in the wilds while drivers rested their camels, we slept peacefully overnight in an efficiently modern, first-class double compartment that featured hot and cold water, toilet facilities and shower, and made up into a private sitting room in the daytime.

We enjoyed four-course meals in the dining car and relaxed in a club/lounge car that provided full drink service, piano and video movies.

Consequently, when the train blared its way into the new Alice Springs railroad station at 11 a.m., through the landmark Heavitree Gap, we were relaxed, refreshed and ready for a day’s adventure.

Modern Conveniences

“The Alice,” as the town of 24,000 is affectionately known, was not the backward, dusty, rural community we had expected but a delightful blend of old Australia charm and modern convenience, with wide streets, leafy trees, arcades and shopping mall, international restaurants, casino, art galleries, one-of-a-kind tourist attractions and a mix of hotels and motels for every taste.

Our home for two nights would be the sprawling new Sheraton Alice Springs Hotel, modern and efficient with swimming pool, spacious rooms, restaurants and nightly entertainment, plus an excellent coffee shop right off a huge lobby where floors gleam brighter than any this side of the Oriental in Bangkok.

Because we had followed the route of the old camel trains in getting here, it was only fitting that on the evening of our arrival we should book a camel safari to an outback winery for dinner.

We wanted to get the feel of a camel ride. How prophetic that wish would be, even though our host, Nick Smail, advised us to relax in the saddle.

And relax we did, every lurching, jolting, searing, chafing step as we padded from Smail’s Camel Farm out along the dry Todd River bed while our graceless, uncouth, strung-together steeds vacuumed up the spinifex and scrub along the way.

The redeeming feature of the 90-minute trek was the incredible scenery--the Red River gums, coolabahs (gum trees), the symphony of birds and the reds of the hills--that helped us ignore the pain of our backsides.

As we dined at Chateau Hornsby on chilled early red wine and servings of barramunda and wild buffalo steaks nicely prepared by Nick and Michelle Smail, we began to feel more kindly toward the beasts that had brought us here.

I would suggest that everyone ride a camel once . . . but only once.

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Most major airlines, including Qantas, Australian and Ansett, fly into Alice Springs from Sydney, Adelaide and other gateways. Coach tours to Alice Springs can also be booked from cities in Australia.

The Ghan Train: It is wise to book in advance. This Australian National deluxe train departs Adelaide every Thursday at 11 a.m., arriving in Alice Springs at 9:50 a.m. Friday. It leaves Alice at 5 p.m. on Fridays, arriving in Adelaide at 2:50 p.m. Saturdays. From May to October an additional service operates from Adelaide on Monday and from Alice on Tuesday. The Australian National office is at 108 King William St., Adelaide 5000.

Camel trek: Frontier Tours offers half a dozen treks into the outback. Contact Frontier Tours, P.O. Box 2836, Alice Springs, Northern Territory 5750, Australia. Camel rides into the outback are also available as part of several package tours from Globus-Gateway: the Australia in Depth program (17 days, $1,595); Australia and the South Pacific (24 days, includes New Zealand and Fiji, $2,528 to $2,578), and the Complete South Pacific (also includes Tahiti, 30 days, $3,288 to $3,338). Contact Globus-Gateway at 95-25 Queens Blvd., Rego Park, N.Y. 11374, phone (800) 221-0090.

Accommodations: The Sheraton Alice Springs Hotel has 252 air-conditioned rooms with direct dial phones, radio and TV. From $130 Australian. P.O. Box 1634, Alice Springs, Northern Territory 5750, Australia. The Diamond Springs Hotel & Casino (Barrett Drive, P.O. Box 5750) offers deluxe accommodations beginning at $98 Australian. For other facilities write to the Northern Territory Tourist Commission, 99 Todd St., Alice Springs, Northern Territory 5750, Australia.

For more details, contact the Australia Tourist Commission, 2121 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1200, Los Angeles 90067, phone (213) 552-1988.