(My prior three pieces on Australia: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise, and Twenty-seven hours on the Aussie dog.)

Alice Springs sits almost exactly in the geographical center of Australia, well over a 1,300-mile drive from Melbourne, Sydney, or any other of the towns along the small slice of the southeastern coast where almost every citizen lives. It also represents something of Australia’s mythological center, a refuge of civilization in the middle of the vast, desiccated, hostile red outback1 that makes up eighty percent of the country, and is home to the original Australians, the Aboriginals, as well as the rugged, crocodile-taming, beer-chugging, machete-wielding, sun-leathered outbacker, with their cattle, horses, Akubras, demi-boots, shorts, and family of thin women in flour-sack dresses, all of them living off their muscles, wits, and a stoic endurance for hardships unmatched by even the American pioneers or South African Boers.

This image of the outback provides Australians something that distinguishes them from the rest of the English-speaking world, a sense of importance that elevates them above being just another businessman in Sydney or accountant in Melbourne. Every citizen, even in the suburbs of Sydney, becomes part of something exceptional, enigmatic, and exotic. At least, that’s the story promoted by the tourism bureau and by politicians who cosplay as outbackers for photo ops, trading on the image, drama, and romanticism of Australia’s interior.

The outback is central to the notion of a "Real Australia" that many citizens romanticize, or at least the politicians assume they do, and which hovers over any social, political, or cultural discussion. The idea of a mythical ideal society cleansed of current pollutants.

It is also central, in a very real economic utilitarian way, to what makes Australia so wealthy, with its immense deposits of minerals, gases, and metals that can be dug up, shipped off to China, and then years later, returned in finished form as cars, baby prams, and everything else you buy here to maintain a home. Australia is a modern-day banana republic, but with bananas replaced by iron ore, coal, gold, and liquefied natural gas.

The outback is like an extreme version of America’s flyover country, and most Australians literally do only fly over it. When I announced my original Sydney-to-Townsville-to-Alice Springs bus route, I was struck by how many** ** people had strong negative opinions about both places, especially Alice Springs, despite never visiting them. I began jotting down their responses, and by the time I left Sydney, over a hundred people had warned me against going, about ten were neutral or positive, and only five had actually been to the outback.

This was like the cartoonish US stereotype of an out-of-touch coastal urban elite, but in this case, the opinions weren’t confined to the elite, but to almost everyone of every class who lives within fifty miles of the dense (for Australia) southeastern coast.

The divide isn’t without justification. The Australian outback is astonishingly empty, and flown over for a reason; it is harsh, with little water, bad soil, and weather that’s a PhD-level test of human adaptability, and so there simply aren’t many people, or communities in it. Certainly not enough to justify a deep network of roads and buses.

The limited bus timetables, meant I had to modify my original plan, so I instead flew to Townsville, where I spent five days, before catching the weekly bus to Alice Springs, where I spent five more days. Then I flew to Melbourne, and finally home.

Within an hour of landing in Townsville I saw how different it was from Sydney, not just in weather, but in attitude. If Sydney was the exemplary child of LA and London, Townsville was a Florida panhandle town, but with mountains. The English influence was still there, slapped across every surface as a glossy British sheen, and in the sport of choice (rugby), in the accent and the excessive use of diminutives, but its influence had withered to effectively something vestigial.

I often felt like I was in an exaggerated version of southern redneck America, with large work trucks tricked out with giant mud-bogging tires, CB radios, and industrial strength grills, and sports bars jammed with western wear, country music, and NFL gear. Even the surrounding nature has the same harshness, with a sun close to impossible to hide from, and a tangle of snakes and crocodiles (instead of alligators) threatening anyone who goes wandering off into nature without proper boots. Although that didn’t stop a surprising number of people walking around barefoot, an Australian sartorial quirk that strikes me as foolish.

I liked Townsville, and was gifted with perfect winter weather, low humidity and highs in the low seventies. I especially liked the extended beachfront boardwalk, although the amount of posted warnings about sharks, crocodiles, and a menu of different deadly jellyfish made the idea of swimming sound ludicrous. When I mentioned this to an elderly man wading in the enticingly green surf up to his knees, he pointed to all the jugs of vinegar around, explaining you only needed to douse the wound within three minutes. And if you didn’t make it by then? Oh, well, then you would probably be as good as dead mate, but them’s the risks now, aren’t they, before adding, he hadn’t lived to eighty by taking such stupid risks, and it was August, close to the only time he went into the water, because it wasn’t box jelly season.

Townsville was also the first place I saw anyone close to resembling an Aboriginal. I heard and read a lot about the "original Australians" in Sydney, where reminding you that the Irish, English, and more recent Asians are all recent settlers seems to be an obsession, but I hadn’t actually seen any. Sydney is almost entirely, in their own language, settler colonialists. Here it was different, with close to one in ten residents clearly being descended from Aboriginals, or from the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago off the northern coast that despite being a lifelong geography geek, I’d never heard of, or knew was part of Australia.

The first Aboriginals I met was a family in front of a Flo’s Torres Strait Takeaway, and, fitting with the American south analogy, could have been straight out of Florence, South Carolina, or the small rural black town of Lacoochee near where I grew up. It was a slightly tweaked version of "southern rural black" culture, an even less well-to-do version, that was familiar, right down to the teen mother smoking a cigarette while juggling a baby with a bottle of soda, and her equally young husband decked out in a straight-from-the-Walmart bandana, Tupac shirt, and baggy shorts, with faux-gold chains.