The beating heart of the Australian Outback — where Alice Springs sits in the centre of the continent at 600 metres altitude in the gap between the West MacDonnell and East MacDonnell Ranges, and everything beyond the town in every direction is the red desert of the Northern Territory, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (the sacred site of the Anangu people, the world's largest monolith visible from 100 km away) is 470 km southwest by the Stuart Highway, Simpsons Gap and Standley Chasm (both within 40 km of the city centre in the West MacDonnell Ranges — the oldest mountain range in Australia at 1.5 billion years old) have quartzite gorges that glow gold at sunrise, and Alice Springs' annual Henley-on-Todd Regatta (a boat race down a dry riverbed in which teams run through the bottomless hulls of their 'boats' carrying them) is the most peculiarly Australian sporting event in existence
Alice Springs (25,000 city) is the only significant urban centre in central Australia — a remote town in the Northern Territory at the geographical centre of the Australian continent, 1,500 km from the nearest major city (Adelaide or Darwin). The region is the traditional country of the Arrernte (Aranda) people, one of the most studied Indigenous cultures in anthropological history; their song-lines (Tjukurpa — the songline network linking sacred sites across the desert) were the subject of Bruce Chatwin's 1987 book The Songlines.
The Alice Springs region has been the home of the Western Arrernte (Aranda) people for at least 35,000 years — one of the longest continuous cultural traditions in human history. The Alice Springs telegraph station was established in 1872 on the site of the waterhole that the Arrernte called Mparntwe (the meeting of the Dreaming tracks of the caterpillar Dreaming), as a repeater station on the 3,200-km Overland Telegraph Line connecting Adelaide to Darwin (and thus to the global cable network through Batavia). The town of Stuart (renamed Alice Springs in 1933) grew around the telegraph statio…