A Town like Alice

she got a bedroom but tea was over, and she had to go down the wide, dusty main street to a cafe for her evening meal. Cloncurry, she found, had none of the clean glamour of Alice Springs; it was a town redolent of cattle, with wide streets through which to drive the herds down to the stockyards, many hotels, and a few shops. All the houses were of wood with red-painted corrugated iron roofs; the hotels were of two storeys, but very few of the other houses were more than bungalows.
    She had to spend a day here, because the air service to Normanton and Willstown ran weekly on a Wednesday. She went out after breakfast while the air was still cool and walked up the huge main street for half a mile till she came to the end of the town, and she walked down it a quarter of a mile till she came to the other end. Then she went and had a look at the railway station, and, having seen the aerodrome, with that she had exhausted the sights of Cloncurry. She looked in at a shop that sold toys and newspapers, but they were sold out of all reading matter except a few dressmaking journals; as the day was starting to warm up she went back to the hotel. She managed to borrow a copy of the Australian Women's Weekly from the manageress of the hotel and took it up to her room, and took off most of her clothes and lay down on her bed to sweat it out during the heat of the day. Most of the other citizens of Cloncurry seemed to be doing the same thing.
    She revived shortly before tea and had a shower, and went out to the cafe for an ice-cream soda. Stupefied by the heavy meal of roast beef and plum pudding that the Queenslanders call 'tea' she sat in a deckchair for a little in the dusk of the veranda, and went to bed again at about eight o'clock.
    She was called before dawn, and was out at the aerodrome with the first light. The aircraft this time was a vintage Dragon, which wandered round the cattle stations as on the previous flight, Canobie and Wandoola and Milgarra. About midday, after four or five landings, they came to the sea, a desolate marshy coast, and shortly after that they put down at Normanton. Half an hour later they were in the air again for Constance Downs station; they had a cup of tea here and a chat with the manager's wife, and took off on the last leg to Willstown.
    They got there about the middle of the afternoon, and Jean got a bird's-eye view of the place as they circled for a landing. The country was well wooded with gum trees and fairly green; the Gilbert River ran into the sea about three miles below the town. There was deep, permanent water in it as far up as Willstown and beyond, because she could see a wooden jetty, and the river ran inland out of sight into the heat haze with water in it as far as she could see. All the other watercourses, however, seemed to be dry.
    The town itself consisted of about thirty buildings, very widely scattered on two enormous intersecting streets or areas of land, for the streets were not paved. Only one building, which she later learned to be the hotel, was of two storeys. From the town dirt tracks ran out into the country in various directions. That was all that one could see of Willstown, that and a magnificent aerodrome put there in the war for defence purposes, with three enormous tarmac runways each a mile long.
    They landed upon one of these huge runways, and taxied towards a truck parked at the runway intersection; this truck was loaded with two barrels of petrol and a semi-rotary pump for refuelling. The pilot said to Jean as he came down the cabin, "You're getting off here, Miss Paget? Is anyone meeting you?"
    She shook her head. "I want to see a man who's living in this district, on one of the stations. I'll have to go to the hotel, I think."
    "Who is it? Al Burns, the Shell agent out there on the truck, he knows everybody here."
    She said, "Oh, that's a good idea. I want to see Mr Joe Harman. He's manager of Midhurst station."
    They got out of the aeroplane together. "Morning, Al," the pilot said. "She'll take about forty gallons. I'll have a look at the oil in a minute. Is Joe Harman in town?"
    "Joe Harman?" said the man in the truck. He was a lean, dark-haired man of forty or so. "Joe Harman's in England. Went there for a holiday."
    Jean blinked, and tried to collect her thoughts. She had been prepared to hear that Harman was out on his property or even that he was away in Cairns or Townsville, but it was absurd to be told that he was in England. She was staggered