I'd heard Mick talk about a great restaurant Claire has taken hom to in Alice, so we decided to treat ourselves and go there. Food was reasonably priced, but the wine was exhorbitantly expensive. Russ had just finished a bottle of wine we paid $10 for at Seppelts winery-it was on Hanuman's winelist for $50.00 (a good mark up I'd say). No matter, the food was fantastic-as good as I've eaten in any Indian restaurant we've been to! We had a mild barramundi curry, medium red curry duck, spicy lentil dahl, roti, raita, rice and a nice bottle of NZ Sav Blanc. Highly recommend the place if you're in town!
We crossed the road and bought ourselves a ticket to the Araluen Cultural Precinct. The precinct contains an excellent art gallery, the Strehlow Research Centre, Centrel Australian Aviation Museum a local craft gallery and work shop and a performing arts centre.
We were able to use the tickets ($10 each) over two days so visited a few times between shopping, laundry and just relaxing.
I especially enjoyed the Albert Namatjira gallery and an exhibition showing the importance of visiting "home" to the aboriginals. That one contained some amazing grass weaving, tin toys and cloth sculptures. Fantastic (but no photos allowed).
I Googled and found this photo of the grass Toyota made by the women. It was fantastic!!! and around a metre high and more than 2 long with dogs in the back
The Strehlow RC houses artifacts collected by anthropologist Ted Strehlow who was born and lived most of his life amongst the aboriginals of Hermansberg where his father was a missionary for 22 years.
It seemed to be an under visited facility-often we were the only ones wandering around, but it was really, really good.
On one of our shopping trips, I went to the chemist to get a prescription filled. My health care card was declined. I handed over Russ's aged pension card-declined. Went round to the saddest Centrelink I've ever had to visit. My health care card hadn't been processed from April 3rd in W'bool, pension card cancelled for failing to meet the identity criteria. Finally all fixed for US, but Centrelink still a sad, depressing place in Alice!
I saw lots of things in Alice that made me sad. Probably the one that has affected me the most was watching a group of about 6 boys aged between 9 and 12 descend on Target. They split up and were racing around the isles. The security guy was trying to keep an eye on them, but they were just everywhere all at once. I watched them brazenly stuffing things in their track suit pants before they left the store. What's the future hold for them?!
Today we left early and drove to Tennant Creek. It's been a lovely day. The country is looking beautiful-lush and green with water in lots of the creeks, floodways and waterholes we crossed or passed. So different to last time we came this way. We took time out to stop at the Devil's Marbles which were also looking so much prettier this time.
We had a slight scare today! We drove through Ti Tree expecting to have lunch and get diesel at Barrow Creek. The pump there was out of order, so we had to drive on SLOWLY to Wycliffe Well Roadhouse where we were very happy to pay $2 a litre for fuel!
No comments:
Post a Comment