Alice Springs by Eleanor Hogan: book review

Alice Springs is a city in central Australia – in the outback, the heart of the nation. Alice Springs is more affectionately called Alice – once called Stuart in 1988, but renamed in 1933. Its First Nations name is Mpartntwe. Alice Springs (2012), the non-fiction travel/memoir, spans the years 2005 to 2009, when the author worked as a policy officer for the Aboriginal Health Service.

Hogan tells of a place with higher than average family violence, alcoholism, anti-social behaviour, and intergenerational trauma amongst the local population. She discusses the stolen generation in which the church and missions removed children from their parents to raise them in response to fears of miscegenation – interracial marriages. Later figures showed that women removed as children were three times more likely to be victims of violence than those who were not removed from their parents. The rates of fatal car accidents were also disproportionately high. And the unemployment rate – in 2009, First Nations peoples were employed in only 600 of the 11,000 jobs in the city.

She writes of court cases, interracial homicides, women-on-women violence, and that in 2007 Alice was known as the “stabbing capital of the world.” She writes too of the black-white divide. As one person tells the author, “Alice taught me grey.” “Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children play together, then drift into two separate groups around the age of fifteen.”  But most people stay in Alice, on average, for only five years.

It’s not all negative – Hogan writes too of the value of shade (in the heat), sport, societies and organizations, art and art galleries.

Alice is a place of 26,000 residents with 50 women to every man. What attracts so many women “straight, gay, or otherwise, to live in the middle of the desert”? Hogan is referring to educated white women. And the reason may be a number of factors – the arts movement of the 1970s (such as filmmaking and drama), the social justice industry, the service industries, environmental advocacy, the space base (Pine Gap) peace protests (aka Karen Silkwood), or to be free of the constraints of “good-girl” manners of city living. In any case, women gravitate toward the heart. Some would even say that it’s due to the “many circular and rounded shapes” of the landscape – very feminine attributes of the countryside.

Hogan paints a real-life view of living long(ish) term in Alice Springs where everything from the heat to the future of the city is explored.  However, the essence of the book is “everything’s extreme in central Australia.”

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).