November 7, 2001-The Worst Little Motel
(photos:Telegraph station,Telly the camel & Toby,
School of the Air)
I was not prepared to describe our motel room yesterday. I was too traumatized. I survived the night by being out of the room until we were ready to go to bed. I can honestly say that until I crawled between the sheets, I didn’t sit down on the bed or a chair. Fortunately I had my lenses out in the shower so I only saw a fuzzy residue, but when I dropped the top to the shampoo I knew I would have to open my eyes & actually look at the drain where it landed. There was no way I was going to blindly feel around the floor in search of it. Not only is the carpet the original 1960’s indoor-outdoor, but I’m sure that it has never felt a drop of shampoo. The walls are dirt speckled in addition to other speckles about which I’m afraid to conjecture. The first motel room I’ve been in that has a queen size bed & a bunk bed. I’m sure it’s used as a hostel room when not booked as a private one.
David suggested we look for another place, but it was late in the afternoon when we arrived yesterday & we wanted to see some sights. As you can tell, I survived until morning none the worse for the filth. Speaking of which, a continental breakfast was included with our room. The dining room of the hostel was even more ghastly than the room. I would rank it as bad as any camp dining hall & kitchen I have ever seen. I stuck to bottled juice & boxed cereal without milk. Other guests said that the milk had turned. The “cook” opened a new jug & it too tasted off. I think the entire lot had gone bad although they were still within the freshness date. The flies weren’t as bad as some camps, but it was early in the day & still cool. They really come out en masse in the heat of the day. The Australian salute is basically waving your hand to get rid of the flies.
There’s a 1-5 star rating system in Australia, but I’ve found it’s much different than we’re used to. They don’t seem to be as discerning. This motel is listed as a 3 star. The motel we stayed at in Cairns was a 3 ½ star. In retrospect, it was more than half a star better than this one. We’ll have to take this into consideration when booking in the future.
There are an awful lot of aborigines in this area. They hang out around downtown where there’s a park with public restrooms, an indoor mall, & a pedestrian mall. They look disheveled & meander up & down the streets. Police cars are in evidence, but we didn’t see any trouble. When I went to use the indoor mall restroom, I was charged fifty cents. I was so shocked I asked the attendant what the rationale was for the charge. She told me quite candidly that it was to keep the masses out, “you know what I mean.” And I did.
Old Time Communications
There was a gorgeous thunderstorm last night & the air was fresh as we headed out to see the original telegraph station. Along the road we passed a road train hauling 4 BP gas tankers. The telegraph station was the first settlement in Alice Springs. There’s even a spring there.. It was a working relay station from 1872-1932. They had a camel pen to show us how the residents hauled goods & supplies from the nearest train depot which was several hundred km away. The telegraph revolutionized communication in Australia. It used to take three months to send a letter to England. It still takes three months to ship parcels. Surface mail hasn’t changed since then. Aside from the history & the quaint tin roofed stone buildings, the bird life was enchanting. We saw gulahs, gray birds with pink breasts. They look like parrots & are about the same size.
Next we went to the School of the Air. In 1951, a woman was sitting in the radio room of the Royal Australian Flying Doctor Service (RAFDS) & thought about all of the children who were isolated in the outback. She thought it would be a good idea to connect them to a teacher by radio. That way they could remain with their families & not have to miss out on education or go to boarding school. The school runs according to the public school year with the same holiday times. Each child has a tutor who is a family member or a paid tutor & in the home during the school day. There must be a special area in the home designated as a classroom. There’s a set time for radio class with group & individual instruction followed by assignments done with the tutor. Lessons are air mailed to each student & since most of them have home landing strips for this purpose or for the RAFDS in case of emergency, airmail is used to return assignments to the teacher as well. Audio-video & print material as well as fax is used. It takes 35 minutes to download a page of information since the homes where the children live have low voltage & work off of generators so computers are used for email & the Internet only. High school age students have a choice of taking correspondence courses or going to boarding school. There are home visits made by the teachers at regular intervals. The 30 aboriginal children are visited more often. They take English as a second language & their tutors teach them in their native tongue. All children learn Indonesian as a foreign language. That should come in handy. We heard that the Muslims had just bombed an Australian school in Indonesia. Once a year the 130 children enrolled in the Alice Springs school have a get together & festival so they can interact & get to know who’s in their class. There are 17 schools of the air located across the country. The cost is $100/family /year. Government funding & donations make up the rest of the budget. Visitors could see & hear a lesson in progress. They were playing some kind of educational board game. In the next studio, Nickelodeon was filming a program.
As we were leaving the school, a family that sounded American was planning to call a taxi. They were from Winnipeg, Canada, & he was on a teacher exchange program in Melbourne. He went next door to visit a public school building & his wife & children, ages 7 & 5, were waiting for him to return so they could call the cab. We offered to give them a lift if they were going somewhere close by. That was a silly question since everything in Alice is close. They were on their way to the telegraph station. The Mom ran off to get her husband leaving the two children sitting on a ledge. I didn’t realize it until David pointed it out, but that put us in charge of the kids. Our car was due back at the rental place in a half hour & we hoped the parents would return quickly. They came running back from the school & we managed to get everything accomplished in time. What we realized after it was all over was that we & they had just negated all the lessons about not talking to strangers or getting into cars with strangers. They even left the kids with strangers.
Missions of Mercy
Our next stop was the RAFDS or flying doctors. A missionary established it in 1929. The Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Service made the first flight, hence Qantas. Originally the flying docs provided emergency services treating on site or transport to a hospital. Now they’re an integral part of the health care system here. They’re based in remote areas as well as in cities where they provide med-evac services as well as clinical care in the outback. They have a fascinating array of very clever charts & equipment to diagnose & treat. There are charts of the human body marked off in sections with each area having its own letter or number. They supply each station (ranch) or outpost with a medical box that has medical supplies & medication that are identified by number. So if you have a pain or a cut on # 15 or letter D, you simply take two # 35s, rub in some # 12, & radio back in the morning. I can just hear those outback wives now saying, “Not tonight dear, I have a #26.”
Toby
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