The Green Centre

The ‘Red Centre’ is the colloquial name for the desert area surrounding Uluru (Ayers Rock), and including – the best part of 500 kilometers away – the town of Alice Springs: ‘Centre’ because, well, it’s in the centre of Australia, and ‘red’ because of the oxidized iron in the soil and rocks that gives the area its distinctive and immediately recognizable glow. Who hasn’t seen those sunrise and sunset photos of Uluru?

The first part of my flight down from Darwin to Alice Springs was therefore pretty much as expected. We took off from humid, tropical Darwin into mountainous clouds that soon obscured the ground, and when our ride smoothed out a bit and the view beneath us cleared, the ground below was the brown of bare earth and dried vegetation, with tell-tale green revealing the damper soils of river valleys.

But what happened then was not at all expected, for instead of getting dryer and redder, the landscape spread out below got greener …

… and by the time that we landed at Alice airport, the natural vegetation looked as though someone had been out regularly with a hose for the last few months.

The ‘someone’ was Mother Nature, and compared with an average annual rainfall of 283 mm (less than a foot) of rain, she had already lavished 583 mm of rain on the weather station at Alice Springs airport by the end of September. Years as wet as 2010 happen about once in a decade, and the desert vegetation responds with a vengeance, with seeds germinating, and plants flowering and producing the next generation of seeds, in short order. Those red blobs in the previous photo are the flowers of the desert poppy, which hasn’t been seen in Alice for ten years.

At the Hotel, I borrowed a hire bicycle to have a look around town, and was warned that I would have to cycle through water to get across the Todd River. The Todd River is a peculiar affair: for most of the time it’s reduced to a few derisory billabongs, one of which gives its name to the town, and the dry sandy riverbed is used by the locals as a pedestrian shortcut. Rare heavy rain turns it back into a river, however, and local custom has it that you aren’t a proper native of Alice until you have seen the Todd River flowing three times. In the event, I missed my first step towards nativehood by a few hours …

… and was just a smidge jealous of another MLer who had seen it flowing earlier this year. I think the ‘road closed’ photo near the bottom of Alastair’s Alice post is the same river crossing as my photo above.

Missing the Todd River in action was partially compensated the next day, when I set off from Alice in my second campervan and discovered that, not only were there floodways, but some of them actually had water in them, unlike the ones in Kakadu:

A bit later, I stopped at one to take a photo, and caught a familiar sound – a mixture of chirruping and choking bird song. Those of you with sharp eyesight will just be able to make out, perched on a twiggy diagonal branch going left from the tree in the centre, a small group of budgerigars:

The only difference from their caged counterparts was that they were all green with yellow faces. For the rest of the day, I saw regular groups of two or three budgies – little green darts – flying overhead as I drove along through the Green Centre.