looked best at night, bathing in the red-golden afterglow of a brilliant sunset, its streets casting their sulphur yellow aura across broad empty strips of road.  Little white house lights twinkled here and there.  Dots or stars in the desert. Something about it made it look like a “Close Encounters” landing strip for aliens.

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Alice Springs

By day, it looked less spectacular, a flat sprawl of houses surrounded by the McDonnell Ranges with a few young trees poking out of the red desert earth.  The Todd River frequently dried up.  This was the town in which the Royal Flying Doctor Service was established.   People all over the world knew Alice from the movie “A Town Like Alice” and the funny Australian movie “Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.”  They may even have heard that at some point in the town’s history, a local with an absurd yet admirable sense of humour had instigated what became the traditional yachting regatta, the Henly on Todd Regatta.

Since the river there rarely had water in it, the yachts were built bottomless and the regatta was all done by foot power.  I do not jest!  Fred Flintstone would have been proud of the way those guys ran if he wasn’t a cartoon! 

Of course, it was for the Camel Cup Blatherskite Park in Alice Springs which Abdullah O’Toole came.  You can tell from his name he was just a tad Irish, and it’s fair to guess that somewhere in his non-Irish heritage there were people who knew about camels.  So he went there for a reason.

Some wise guy had imported camels to Australia since they were ships of the desert and the one thing Australia had was one huge red centre of desert, so we can see why he did it.   The only thing the Australian desert is good for apart from Aboriginal goings on is the madness and mayhem of Dunny Racing at Winton in the Northern Territories and the camel races at Alice.  They were once sponsored by Camel filtered cigarettes, but nowadays it is not the done thing for sporting events to be sponsored by cigarette companies since smoking kills is the message.