Onetime Oasis Beset by Sands of Time

Five emus pick their way out of the scrub of the Outback and wander across a road and into a backyard as a cloud of red dust blows between almost deserted three-story apartment buildings.

In Woomera, a tiny town in the baking heart of Australia, the desert seems to be trying to claw back land taken from it just over 50 years ago.

Built from scratch in 1947 to house workers at a joint British-Australian missile-testing base, Woomera is now making headlines as home to Australia’s most notorious detention center for illegal immigrants--a collection of huts enclosed by high fences and razor wire on a barren plain that stretches through a shimmering heat haze as far as the eye can see, and well beyond.

Hundreds of asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq and South Asia are held in the camp during processing of their applications for refugee status, which can take up to three years.

A mile away, the town itself is an oasis of green in the vast, parched expanse of central Australia. The green comes courtesy of fresh water piped from Port Augusta, the nearest town, 110 miles to the south.

Houses and apartment buildings are set out on tree-lined streets in a roughly square grid. Models of rockets and aircraft tested at Woomera are dotted around the settlement.

“Woomera really is a very pretty, tidy, pleasant town to live in. It just happens to be in the middle of nowhere,” said Bob McKenzie, who oversees the community for the Australian Defense Force, which owns the land and all the buildings.

At the height of the missile range’s use, Woomera--the name is an Aboriginal word meaning spear thrower--boasted a population of 7,000. Now, only about 400 people live here.

From the early 1970s a steady stream of Americans passed through town when they were posted at Nurrungar, a nearby U.S. defense satellite monitoring station. But with Nurrungar’s closure in October 1999, much of the energy ebbed out of Woomera.

“It really was great living here,” said Henriette Greenfield, a resident for 10 years. “Then the Americans left and a whole lot of uncertainty entered the town.”

Work provided by the detention center is helping Woomera survive. But even that is threatened, with the government saying it may close the center as part of a deal that ended a recent two-week hunger strike by asylum seekers.

Greenfield, who heads Woomera Board, a panel that advises McKenzie on community developments, is one of the few residents prepared to discuss the town and its relationship with the detention center.

McKenzie puts people’s reticence down to Woomera’s history as a defense-dominated settlement. “Until 1982, the whole town was fenced off,” he said.

Streets are generally deserted in the summer as temperatures hover around 104 degrees most days, making it an ordeal just to cross the road.

McKenzie concedes summers are uncomfortable, but says mild winters with virtually nonstop sunny days make up for it.

“Climatically, it’s a very, very nice place,” he said.

To make life as comfortable as possible for the servicemen and women originally sent to Woomera, the Australian military provided as many leisure facilities as possible since the nearest city, Adelaide, is 310 miles to the south.

The town has a movie theater, which opens on the weekends, a bowling alley, a small wildlife park and a floodlit sports ground--the largest patch of green grass for hundreds of miles--as well as a well-equipped gym and a swimming pool.

There is one pub, which doubles as a hotel and restaurant and is trying to establish itself as a “center of Outback cuisine,” McKenzie said.

At a recent party, the chef turned out dishes including sushi, marinated camel skewers and a terrine of hare and kangaroo. Camels roam wild through the Outback, the descendants of animals brought to Australia as pack animals in the 19th century by explorers seeking to open up the Outback.

Local authorities hope work at the rocket range will pick up again. There are four or five consortiums looking at using the range for projects including development of a new supersonic jet and testing of a planned NASA escape module for the international space station, McKenzie said.

Despite his optimism, he concedes the town probably will never return to the days when it was thronging with 7,000 people. The projects considering using the site are smaller than in the past, and increased technology means fewer employees are needed.

And with the dwindling population, even one of the great joys of life in the Outback is not as much fun as it used to be.

“We used to have fantastic barbecues when heaps of people came,” Greenfield said. “We still have barbecues, but only two families come.”