A Town like Alice

I'd be tickled to death if she had money, same as any man. But there's more to it than that."
    He paused again. "I come from the outback," he said slowly. "Running a cattle station is the only work I know, and its where I like to be. I couldn't make out in any of the big cities, Brisbane or Sydney. I couldn't make out even in Cairns for very long, and anyway, there'd be no work there I could do. I never got a lot of schooling, living on a station like we did. I don't say that I won't make money. I can run a station better'n most ringers, and I seem to do all right with selling the stock too. I'll hope to get a station of my own one day, and there's plenty of station owners finish up with fifty thousand pounds. But if I get that far, it'll be staying in the outback and doing what I'm cut out for. And I tell you, Mr Strachan, the outback is a crook place for a woman."
    "In what way?" I asked quietly. We were really getting down to something now.
    He smiled a little wryly. "Take Willstown, as an example. There's no radio station to listen to, only the short wave stuff from Brisbane and that comes and goes with static. There's no shop where you can buy fruit or fresh vegetables. The sister says that it's because of that so many of the old folk get this pellagra. There's no fresh milk. There's no dress shop, only what a woman can get in Bill Duncan's Store along with the dried peas and Jeyes Fluid and that. There's no ice-cream in Willstown. There's nowhere that a woman can buy a paper or a magazine or a book, and there's no doctor because we can't get one to come to Willstown. There's no telephone. There's no swimming-pool where a girl could sit around in a pretty bathing dress, although it can be hot there, oh my word. There's no other young women. I don't believe there's more'n five women in the district between the age of seventeen and forty; as soon as they're old enough to leave home they're off out of it, and down to the city. To get to Cairns to do a bit of shopping you can either fly, which costs money, or you can drive for four days in a jeep, and after that you'll find the jeep needs a new set of tyres." He paused. "It's a grand country for a man to live and work in, and good money, too. But it's a crook place for a woman."
    "I see," I said. "Are all the outback towns like that?"
    "Most of them," he said. "You get the bigger ones, like the Curry, they're better, of course. But Camooweal and Normanton and Burketown and Croydon and Georgetown-they're all just the same as Willstown." He paused for a moment in thought. "There's only one good one for a woman," he said. "Alice Springs. Alice is a bonza place, oh my word. A girl's got everything in Alice-two picture houses, shops for everything, fruit, ice-cream, fresh milk, Eddie Maclean's swimming-pool, plenty of girls and young married women in the place, and nice houses to live in. Alice is a bonza town," he said, "but that's the only one."
    "Why is that?" I asked. "What makes Alice different from the others?"
    He scratched his head. "I dunno," he said. "It's just that it's got bigger, I suppose."
    I left that one. "What you mean is that if you got Miss Paget to agree to marry you, she wouldn't have a very happy life in Willstown."
    He nodded. "That's right," he said, and there was pain in his eyes. "It all seemed sort of different when I met her in Malaya. You see, she was a prisoner and she hadn't got nothing, and I hadn't got nothing either, so there was a pair of us. When I got to know there was a chance she wouldn't be married I was so much in a hurry to get over here I didn't stop to think about the outback, or if I did I thought of her as someone who'd got nothing so she'd be all right in Willstown. See what I mean?" He looked at me appealingly. "But then I come to England and I see Southampton and the sort of way people live there, bombed and muggered up although it is, and I been in London and I been in Colwyn Bay. Then when you told me she'd come into money I got thinking about how she would be living and the sort of things that she'd be used to and she wouldn't get in Willstown, and then I thought I'd acted a bit hasty. I never know it to work, for a girl to come straight out from England to the outback. And for a girl with money of her own, it’ll be worse still." He paused, and grinned at me. "So I went out on the grog."
    In all the circumstances, it now seemed to me that he had taken a very reasonable line of action, but it was a pity it had cost