Apart from Canberra (ACT) Alice Springs (alt. 550m; pop. 25,000) is the only important town in the interior of Australia.
Alice Springs is an important base camp for tours (either by independent travelers in a hired car, all-terrain vehicle or camper van or by organized groups, to the fascinating natural beauties of central Australia - Ayers
Rock, the western and eastern MacDonnell Ranges, Kings Canyon or the boundless expanses of the outback.
This arid desert region was from time immemorial the home of the Aranda tribes. In 1871 a repeater station on the Overland Telegraph Line was established to the north of the Heavitree Gap in the rocky MacDonnell Ranges, close to a waterhole in a normally dry river bed. The site was selected by the surveyor William Mills and the waterhole was named after Alice Todd, wife of Charles Todd, postmaster-general of South Australia, and the river became the Todd River. Charles Todd was responsible for carrying out the project for a transcontinental telegraph line to provide faster communication between Britain and eastern Australia.
The town itself grew up 4km south of the telegraph station and until 1933 was called Stuart Town in honor of John McDouall Stuart, who was the first to find his way through the Red Centre of Australia to the north coast in 1862.
At first the place attracted few settlers, and the railroad line from Adelaide which had been promised reached only as far north as Oodnadatta. Numerous expeditions, herds of stock and prospectors made a stopover at Heavitree Gap on their journey along the track which later became the Stuart Highway. The little settlement was wholly dependent for supplies on the camel caravans led by Afghan and Indian camel drivers until the coming of the railroad in 1929 marked the beginning of a new era.
During the brief period when the Northern Territory was divided into North and Central Australia (1926-32) Stuart Town was the seat of government for Central Australia, and the number of white inhabitants increased steadily. The economy of the Red Centre now depended on extensive cattle grazing and mining. During the second world war Alice Springs became an important military base and, after the bombing of Darwin, the seat of government of the Northern Territory.
A major contribution to the development of Alice Springs and the outback was made by the Anglican missionary the Rev. John Flynn (d. 1951), the moving spirit in the establishment of the Flying Doctor Service and the Inland Mission with its hospitals and welfare centers. The first hospital in the center of Australia was built in 1920-6.
Neville Shute's novel A Town like Alice (1950) and its filming made Alice Springs - familiarly known to Australians as 'the Alice' - famed throughout the world.
The new Alice Springs
After the Second World War the tourist development of Alice Springs and the Red Centre began, stimulated by the enthusiastic accounts by ex-soldiers fascinated by the outback. As a result the town has been completely transformed, and little is left of the dusty outback settlement that it once was. It is now a town of restaurants, luxury hotels and caravan parks, entertainments of all kinds and innumerable shops and galleries. The development of the town's administrative and supply functions is reflected in many new buildings within the town and on its ever-spreading outskirts.
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