A Town like Alice

you're not much good to me for a story."
    "Tell me, Mr Hopkinson," she said, "how do the buses go from here to Alice Springs? I want to go down there, and I haven't got much money, so I thought I'd go by bus. That's possible, isn't it?"
    "Sure," he said. "One went this morning. You'll have to wait till Monday now; they don't run over the weekend."
    "How long does it take?"
    "Two days. You start on Monday, stop at Daly Waters Monday night, and get in late on Tuesday. It's not too bad a journey, but it can be hot, you know."
    He put her down at the hotel and carried her bag into the lobby for her. She was lucky in that overcrowded place to get a room to herself, a room with a balcony overlooking the harbour. It was hot in Darwin, with a damp enervating heat that brought her out in streams of perspiration at the slightest movement. This was no novelty to her because she was accustomed to the tropics; she bolted the door and took off her clothes and had a shower, and washed some things in the hand basin, and lay down to sleep with a bare minimum of covering.
    She woke early next morning and lay for some time in the cool of the dawn considering her position. It was imperative to her that she should find Joe Harman and talk to him; at the same time the meeting with Mr Hopkinson had warned her that there were certain difficulties ahead. However pleasant these young men might be, their duty was to get a story for the paper, and she had no desire whatever to figure in the headlines, as she certainly would do if the truth of her intentions became known. 'Girl flies from Britain to seek soldier crucified for her…' It would be far easier if she were a man. However, she wasn't.
    She set to work to invent a story for herself, and finally decided that she was going out to Adelaide to stay with her sister who was married to a man called Holmes who worked in the Post Office; that seemed a fairly safe one. She was travelling by way of Darwin and Alice Springs because a second cousin called Joe Harman was supposed to be working there but hadn't written home for nine years, and her uncle wanted to know if he was still alive. From Alice she would take the train down to Adelaide.
    It didn't quite explain why she had come to Darwin in a Constellation, except that there is no other way to get to Darwin. Lying on her bed and cogitating this it seemed a pretty waterproof tale; when she got up and went downstairs for breakfast she decided to try it out on Stuart Hopkinson. She got her chance that morning as he showed her the way to the bus booking-office; she let it out in little artistic snippets over half an hour of conversation, and the representative of the Sydney Monitor swallowed it without question so that she became a little ashamed of herself.
    He took her into a milk bar and stood her a Coca-Cola. "Joe Harman…" he said. "What was he doing at Alice nine years ago?"
    She sucked her straw. "He was a cowboy on a cattle farm," she said innocently, and hoped she wasn't overdoing it.
    "A stockman? Do you remember the name of the station?"
    "Wollara," she said. "That's the name, Wollara. That's near Alice Springs, isn't it?"
    "I don't know," he said. "I'll try and find out."
    He came back to her after lunch with Hal Porter of the Adelaide Herald. "Wollara's a good long way from Alice Springs," said Mr Porter. "The homestead must be nearly a hundred and twenty miles away. You mean Tommy Duveen's place?"
    "I think that's it," she said. "Is there a bus there from Alice Springs?"
    "There's no bus or any way of getting there except to drive there in a truck or a utility."
    Hopkinson said. "It's on one of Eddie Maclean's rounds, isn't it?"
    "Now you mention it, I think it is." Porter turned to Jean. "Maclean Airways run around most of those stations once a week, delivering the mail," he said. "You may find that you could get there by plane. If so, that's much the easiest."
    Her ideas about reporters had been moulded by the cinema; it was a surprise to her to find that in real life they could be kind and helpful people with good manners. She thanked them with sincere gratitude, and they took her out for a run round Darwin in a car. She exclaimed at the marvellous, white sand beaches and the azure blue of the sea, and suggested that a bathing party might be a good thing.
    "There's one or two objections," Mr Porter said. "One is the sharks. They'll take you if you go out more than knee deep. Another is the alligators. Then there's the stone