Alice Springs - plants, animals, school of the air

We started our day at the Alice Springs Desert Park, which displays many of the animals and birds of Central Australia. Our Aboriginal guide started our tour by explaining the traditional life in this region. He started by demonstrating many of the traditional tools: the digging stick made from ironhead wood – which took a week to carve with stone tools, smoothed with a rock and then covered with emu oil. This stick could last a hundred years to dig for water. Similarly, a spear thrower would have a catch for the spear made from kangaroo tendon which was cemented together with the resin from Spinefex Grass. The boomerang was used for hunting kangaroo while a thin wooden shield would be used to protect yourself during wars between tribes.

Aboriginal Tools and Fruits

The desert provided many forms of food: millet seeds were ground into a flour for bread, bush plums, bush coconut, and bush bananas were common fruits. Honey ants would be found to provide honey, other trees provided a kind of passion fruit.  The desert also provided wild tobacco which produced a slight high.

We had a bird show which highlighted the local birds: Australian Magpies, Barn Owls (whose face focuses sounds and which soured above us in complete silence), the white-faced heron, and the quick moves of the Australian Hobby, a falcon. Nearby we visited various lizards and insects. In the afternoon, we visited a reptile place, the presenter was a little late, because he had just come from a home where he removed a Suitor Snake. He showed us a Bearded Dragon, which has soft spikes around his body. He can change color to help regulate his temperature. Then we saw a blue tongued skink with its smooth, dry skin. It uses its tongue to smell. Our guide also explained that while Australia has the 10 most poisonous snakes in the world, none can detect the heat of your body and all have fangs of ¼ inch or less. Thus as long as you wear shoes and loose fitting pants, you probably won’t be bitten. Even if you are bitten, only 1 out of 10 times will they use venom on a human. Only 2 people a year die from snake bites here, while if you lived in Sri Lanka (about the same population), 20,000 die per year. Finally he showed us an Olive Python weighting about 20 kilos. He demonstrated how to hold this snake and four of us proceeded to hold it. In bright sunlight the skin shines like a rainbow, perhaps the origin of the Aboriginal story about rainbow snakes. Outside we saw a number of lizards: the Thorny Devil, Mertens’ Water Monitor, and the Australian Saltwater Crocodile. He was completely silent under the water, they can stay under for 2-3 hours and move without disturbing the surface. But when the surface is disturbed quickly move as we saw in a demonstration when he threw a buoy in the water.

Thorny Devil

Our last stop of the day was the Alice Springs School of the Air. Started in 1951, the school used radio to teach courses from pre-school to grade 9 through sparsely populated central Australia. Most of the coursework was correspondence work with additional instruction via radio. Today, most of the work is done using satellite provided internet. Each grade has ½ to 2 ½ hours of on-line content. You must have a home teacher, usually a parent, to assist. Currently they have 141 students who live 80 to 1000 km from Alice Springs. You can attend if you don’t have a school within 50 km. have a home teacher, and speak adequate English. While we were there, the classes were actually in Alice Springs, one of the three times they get together each year for classes, national tests, group activities and sports.

In the evening, we had a barbie out on the lawn of our hotel. While Wayne was cooking the meat we had Digeridoo lessons from Andy, who has been playing around the world for over 20 years. He attempted to show us how to do it correctly by vibrating our lips with our air coming from the diaphragm. Well, none of us were very good but it was an entertaining time as he demonstrated how to properly play the instrument. One of the more interesting aspects was that the instrument is traditionally taken from a tree, where the termites have eaten through the inner part of the tree. The length of the narrow part of the wood determines the instruments basic pitch, while a flare out at the end helps amplify the sound. Our barbeque consisted of beef steak, lamb chops, and a honey infused beef sausage, with salads provided by the hotel. It was a fun evening.