Centre of the racial divide

In his seminal novel A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute’s portrayal of Australia as a honeyed continent of opportunity helped fuel the post-war influx of ten-pound Poms” taking up the federal government’s offer of assisted migration.

- BERNARD LAGAN

 trickle came to Alice Springs, described in the novel as a“ bonza place” in the shadows of central Australia’s rust-red West MacDonnell Ranges, 1700 miles 2750km) by road from Sydney.

Other early intruders were left anxious. The Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh, who arrived in Alice Springs in 1933 while exploring a futile plan to populate the Outback with 100,000 East European Jews, wrote of his uncontrollable joy and fear”.

“One feels,” he wrote, that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents Australia.”

Ravitsh’s edgy description of the strange desert capital in the centre of the country has endured, rather than Shute’s more generous portrait.

Alice is a town under siege. Its shops, cafes and galleries selling Aboriginal desert art are sluggish. Most are barricaded with stony-looking, steel roller doors to stem the nightly window smashings evidenced by police crime statistics showing commercial break-ins have soared by 60% in the year to March 2022.