Alice is quite the handsome town. The residential areas are dominated by bungalows that seem to have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, there are lots of green spaces, and the avenues are broad and curved, breaking the mold of right-angle streets that plagues so many cities (reminds me of Ciudad Satelite, where I grew up, that brought in a new style of urbanism in the 1960's).
Sunday was a slow day, as I had suspected, but there was a street festival downtown, with crafts, books, and ethnic foods. I went through it, and should have spent more time at the books, but I was heading for the matinee at the cinema, to see the new Indiana Jones movie. Following Ronnie's style I bought myself a big box of popcorn, and happily munched away as Indy had another of his fabulous adventures. I have been in Tangier and Syracuse, so that was an added bonus to the adventure.
By the time the movie ended, at about 1 pm, the Sunday market was starting to close down, but I managed to get a good serving of Pad-Thai for my lunch, as well as a quick look at the books.
Next I dropped by the Megafauna Museum, which is where the collection of fabulous megafauna fossils excavated from the MacDonald Range are displayed. They come from a couple of Miocene beds, ranging in age from 8 to 6 million years ago, from a time at which the luscious forests of the Oligocene were being replaced by the woodlands of the Miocene, an environment that fostered the evolution of large marsupial herbivores, which looked a lot like hippos (Diprotodon); giant flightless birds, maybe twice as large as modern ostriches (Dromornis); and the ancestors of the kangaroo. There were also some mean looking crocs.
To round up my visit to the city I dropped by the public library, which had just closed but had a special exhibit on the books of Nevil Shute, and then headed for the exhibit of the Royal Flying Doctors Service, which completely fascinated me.
Cast back your imagination to 1914, when pastor John Flynn started his Australian Inland Mission, a traveling ministry whose goal was to bring spiritual comfort and loving care to inland Australia. Mind you, if you were to overlay a map of Australia on the continental US it would cover all of it, and if you were to overlay it on a map of Europe it would cover from the tip of Spain to the easternmost side of Turkey, and from Scotland and Estonia in the north, to Sicily on the south. A big piece of real estate to cover on a cart or a car. John Flynn was outspoken, however, and in the 1920's managed to bring the shocking lack of access to healthcare in central Australia to the attention of the government. Finally, in the late 1920's, the government agreed to hire a biplane from Qantas, so that patients in need of medical attention could be brought in from the bush or the stations to town hospitals, or doctors could travel to the outback to provide medical care (costs to be shared 50/50 between the government and John Flynn's ministry). Medicine kits were put together and scattered through the stations, which were in daily communication with their bases via radio (power being generated by hand- or pedal-cranked generators). The kits were augmented by anatomical charts to help folks describe their symptoms to the doctor over the radio, and basic surgery equipment so bleeds could be stopped. These pioneer pilots, doctors, midwives, and nurses stuck to it, and the rest is history. Today, the Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS) operates a fleet of slick hospital jets, services 300,000 outback patients a year, and is in radio contact with the most remote portions of Australia. The toughest job you will ever love!
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