A Town like Alice

fish-he lies on the beach and looks just like a stone until you tread on him, and he squirts about a pint of poison into you. The Portuguese Men-o'-War aren't so good, either. But the thing that really puts me off is Coral Ear."
    "What's that?"
    "A sort of growth inside your head that comes from getting this fine coral sand into your ear."
    Jean came to the conclusion that perhaps she wouldn't bathe in Darwin after all.
    She got her bathe, however, because on Sunday they drove her forty miles or so southwards down the one road to a place called Berry Springs, a deep water hole in a river where the bathing was good. The reporters eyed her curiously when she appeared in her two-piece costume because the weeks that she had spent in native clothes in Kuala Telang had left her body tanned with sunburn in unusual places. It was the first mistake that she had made, and for the first time a dim suspicion crossed their minds that this girl held a story for them if they could only get it out of her.
    "Joe Harman…" said Hal Porter thoughtfully to Stuart Hopkinson. "I'm sure I've heard that name before somewhere, but I can't place it."
    As they drove back from the bathe the reporters told her about Darwin, and the picture they painted was a gloomy one. "Everything that happens here goes crook," Hal Porter said. "The meat works has been closed for years because of labour troubles-they got so many strikes they had to close it down. The railway was intended to go south to Alice and join up with the one from Alice down to Adelaide-go from north to south of the continent. It might have been some good if it had done that, but it got as far as Birdum and then stopped. God knows what it does now. This road has just about put the railway out of business-what business it ever had. There used to be an ice factory, but that's closed down." He paused. "Everywhere you go round here you'll see ruins of things that have been tried and failed."
    "Why is that?" Jean asked. 'It's not a bad place, this. It's got a marvellous harbour."
    "Of course it has. It ought to be a great big port, this place-a port like Singapore. It's the only town of any size at all on the north coast. I don't know. I've been up here too long. It gives me the willies."
    Stuart Hopkinson said cynically, "It's got outbackitis." He smiled at Jean. "You'll see a lot of this in Australia, specially in the north."
    She asked, "Is Alice Springs like this?" It was so very different from the glowing recollections of Alice that Joe Harman had poured out to her, six years before.
    "Oh, well," said Hopkinson, "Alice is different. Alice is all right."
    "Why is it different?" she asked.
    "I don't really know. It's railhead, of course, for trucking cattle down to Adelaide-that's one thing. But it's a go-ahead place is Alice; all sorts of things go on there. I wish to God the Monitor’d send me there instead of here."
    She said goodbye to her two friends that night, and started at dawn next morning in the bus for Alice Springs. The bus was a big, modern Bedford, heavily streamlined; it towed a trailer carrying goods and luggage. It was comfortable enough although not air-conditioned; it cruised down the wide, empty tarmac road at fifty miles an hour, hour after hour, manned by ex-naval crew.
    As far as Katherine, where the bus stopped for lunch, the country was well wooded with rather stunted eucalyptus trees, which Jean discovered were called gums. Between these trees were open meadows of wild land, ungrazed, unused, and uninhabited. She discussed this country with a fellow traveller, a bank inspector on his way to Tennant Creek, and she was told that all this coastal belt was useless for farming for some reason that she could not understand. After Katherine the country gradually became more arid, the trees more scattered and desiccated, till by the evening they were running through a country that was near to desert.
    At dusk they stopped for the night at a place called Daly Waters. Daly Waters, she discovered, was a hotel, a post office, a large aerodrome, and nothing else whatsoever. The hotel was a rambling collection of single-storey wooden huts or dormitories for men and for women, strange to Jean but comfortable enough. She strolled outside before tea, in the dusk, and looked around. In front of the hotel three young men were squatting on their heels with one leg extended in the peculiar attitude that Joe Harman had used; they wore a sort of jodhpur trouser and elastic-sided