With 500 km (300 miles) still to go we set off for the south.
The names of the places along the Stuart Highway indicate better, perhaps, than school geography lessons how important water is in a land with not enough. Tennant Creek, Bonney Well, Wycliffe Well, Taylor Creek, Barrow Creek, Ti Tree Well, Conner Well, Colyer Creek and Alice Springs with just the odd Something Gap to break the monotony.
We visited the Devils Marbles in passing. They are really quite amazing but my greatest impression was that we, the second wave immigrants, were desecrating the sacred sites of the first wave immigrants. I could only cringe at the young people from around the world clambering over these remarkable stones which the original inhabitants think of as the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. I wondered what the reaction would be if a group of Australian Aborigines clambered over St Pauls or Westminster Abbey like these young Europeans do here.
The country in the southern half of the Northern Territory is not as I had expected. The land is essentially flat with a ridge of hills running east-west every 50 km or so. The towns tend to be in the gaps in these ridges through which the telegraph line, and so also the highway, passes. The land in between is remarkably fertile. It is now coming to the end of the dry season and it hasn't rained since early in the year but there is lots of grass and the trees and bushes are very green. I don't quite know what I expected but it wasn't this.
The range of hills which surround Barrow Creek are quite strange. They all have sloping side covered with grass and at the top there is a cliff perhaps 10 or 20 m (30-60 ft) high all the way round like some ancient fortification. I guess the mesas of the American south west are like this.
Barrow Creek is the minimalist Stuart Highway "town". Just a run down 1930s pub cum servo cum general store right next to the lovely old 1880s telegraph station. The formers architecture is celebrated as "retaining its original charm" while the latter's solid stone walls give it an air of permanence belied by the ubiquitous microwave repeater towers which presently dominate the landscape.
The optical fibre cable which is fast replacing the microwave link will, of course, return the telegraph in new form. Instead of single messages in morse code hand keyed and hand decoded conveying the essential public and private news we now have gigabytes of emails complete with multimedia attachments conveying, for the most part, the trivial minutiae of our time.