Outback

Chris Arnade writes of his travels, mostly walking, through the world, with a focus on avoiding downtowns and tourist spots, observing how life is lived for "regular" and particularly in the U.S., by those who are struggling.  His substack is Chris Arnade Walks The World.  It provides a very different perspective than your usual travelogue.  He's also the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America.

Chris recently returned from Australia and just published Alice Springs, Townsville and Crossing the Australian Outback.

The outback is like an extreme version of America's flyover country, and most Australians literally do only fly over it. When I announced my original Sydney-to-Townsville-to-Alice Springs bus route, I was struck by how many people had strong negative opinions about both places, especially Alice Springs, despite never visiting them. I began jotting down their responses, and by the time I left Sydney, over a hundred people had warned me against going, about ten were neutral or positive, and only five had actually been to the outback.

This was like the cartoonish US stereotype of an out-of-touch coastal urban elite, but in this case, the opinions weren’t confined to the elite, but to almost everyone of every class who lives within fifty miles of the dense (for Australia) southeastern coast.

On Alice Springs:

Since everything I was told had been proven wrong, including that the bus ride would be a little slice of hell, I arrived in Alice Springs close to convinced it would be a little slice of heaven, a festival of desert felicity, complete with kumbaya circles of Aboriginals dancing and singing with their now reformed and newly tolerant colonial masters. Or maybe I was going mad, and delusional, from thirty hours without sleep in the unforgiving landscape.

It however wasn't a little slice of heaven, at all, and by the end of the first day I realized that the only thing that everyone who had warned me, had gotten completely correct, was that Alice Springs is, to use Australians favorite vernacular2, a shithole. A shithole of majestic landscapes, and wonderful people, but still a shithole. 

Read it to find out why.