3.2.3 The town of Alice Springs, initially called Stuart, grew up around the Telegraph Station on the Todd River and captured the Australian imagination as a ‘frontier’ land settled by cattle pioneers following the trails of early explorers. Current transport routes, geographical features and place names reflect the travels and aspirations of these early settlers and their colonial masters.

In 1860, the Scottish-born explorer John McDouall Stuart travelled through, naming the MacDonnell Ranges after the Governor of South and writing in glowing terms of the Central Australian landscape, which he 37 believed held out excellent prospects for pastoral development (Carment 1991).

In 1863, what is now the was transferred from New South Wales to . In October 1870, the South Australian Government decided to build a telegraph line from Port Augusta to Port Darwin to link with a sub-sea cable to Britain, the first of many nation-building projects associated with the Northern Territory. The work began under the supervision of Charles Todd, with new telegraph stations at Charlotte Waters, Alice Springs, Barrow Creek and Powell Creek. Planning a route for the telegraph line brought in explorers such as WC

Gosse who named Ayers Rock in 1873 after South Australian Premier, Sir Henry Ayres, while Alice Springs was the

name given to the springs at the telegraph station after Todd’s wife, Alice. The present town of Alice Springs was named after Stuart and proclaimed in 1888. It was close to the Alice Springs Telegraph Station and just north of Heavitree Gap. The first hotel opened in 1889 and by the early 1890s there were a few houses and stores (Carment 1991). Initially the town was accessed by a 1400-kilometre track that followed the route of the early explorers and Overland Telegraph Line. Once the train line reached Oodnadatta from Port Augusta, the remaining journey to

the Alice Springs Telegraph Station took two weeks for a buggy or coach, three or four weeks for pack horses and camels and a month or three for wagons (Bucknall 1990). In 1911, control of what is now the Northern Territory transferred from South Australia to the Commonwealth. Early families endured hardship and drought and were isolated from the rest of Australia until the first Ghan arrived in Alice Springs in 1929, replacing the era of Afghan cameleers. The railway added to the population mix of Alice Springs, with many Chinese and Italian migrants working along the line between the old railhead at Oodnadatta and Alice Springs. Many well-known Aboriginal families were railway workers, with surnames that reflect the intermarriage of Aboriginal people with early Chinese market gardeners and railway workers. In 1933, the name of the town changed from Stuart to Alice Springs and by 1935 Alice Springs had 500 residents, Arafura Resources Social Impact Management Plan 2016 many fleeing the Australian Depression. By 1939, the town had a population of 950, while the war years saw significant development as troops moved through to the northern war front. As the Territory came under military control, pastoralists found a large local market for their beef, contractors won work with the military and many Aboriginal people worked for award wages for the first time (Kruger & Waterford; Carment 1991). By 1943, the Stuart Highway had been sealed to Darwin.

The post-war years saw mixed fortunes in the Territory’s two key economic sectors of mining and cattle, with natural gas found in the Amadeus Basin in the late 1970s and the establishment of the American Pine Gap communications base, which brought many Americans to live in the town. There are now 800 people working at Pine Gap, half of them Australian (Garrick 2016). In 1978 the Territory gained Self-Government, with Territorians such as Sam Calder and Bernie Kilgariff prominent in Territory and national politics and the Country Liberals (then the Country Liberals Party) being founded in Alice Springs, still regarded as the party’s heartland.

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