The Legendary Ghan
It runs from Adelaide north to the Alice —
a thousand miles, as we used to say —
through desert that sears, sans mercy or malice,
fools on foot in the heat of day.
Outside is that sunbaked ochre landscape,
saltbush and spinifex dotting the sandscape;
this air-conditioned train is a palace
on rails, with bathrooms that fold away.
The Ghan that first ran in ’twenty-nine
huffed and puffed its uncertain way
two hundred miles east of this newer line,
and when you might get there, no one could say.
If ever the Ghan should happen along
on time, you’d know that your watch was wrong.
To the scheduled two days might be added nine
or (once) a full fifty-six days of delay!
Flash-floods could wrench the rails to tangled
spaghetti, stranding the train for weeks
while passengers stalked wild goats, or angled
in new-swollen torrents of streams and creeks.
Somewhere way out past Oodnadatta
essential supplies from the skies would spatter
the land with pickles and flour, as mangled
crates, dropped chuteless, sprang food-package leaks.
From Adelaide, leaving the city’s hubbub,
past vines of Riesling and Cabernet
and wheatfields we slide, and soon through scrub,
as greenness dissolves to the coaches’ soft sway.
Beyond Port Augusta the scenery changes
once more, the saltscrub sparse on the ranges
where pinpoint towns — a station, a pub —
were built on the tracker and cameltrain way.
Pimba, Tarcoola, Manguri, Finke River...
they spread in a giant finger span:
points in the blank of the Never-Never,
they marked in their turn the route of the Ghan.
Along it, too, Hawker and Edwards Creek
(“Dodge City” — they’d sooner shoot than speak),
Warrina and Copley, ... the train would deliver —
sometime — its cargo of goods and of man.
There in the “acre per bandicooot” outback,
each whistle-stop town had its tank and a dog,
and always a pub, and a man with a stout back
to handle the barrels of beer, known as grog.
There in the desert so scarce of feature,
the eye hardly ever lights on a creature.
For company, yell and an echo might shout back
from a three-billion-year-old wall of rock.
But this is the modern reincarnation
of the old, original, steam-hauled Ghan,
this legend an advertiser’s creation:
in coach class many a city man
precedes on the rails his Harley or Cruiser,
content to spend the trip as a boozer
till the legend slows at its destination
and all are offloaded according to plan.
The Alice: Alice Springs.
In the 1860s, 34 Afghan tribesmen and 120 camels were brought to South Australia to help carry supplies to remote Outback stations. The locals soon shortened "Afghans" to "Ghans". Within a few years strings of up to 70 camels were criss-crossing Central Australia, opening it up to pastoral settlement. Railways arrived in the 1920s; ironically, the train that displaced the Afghans on the main north-south route itself came to be known as "The Ghan".
Early in 2004, since this was written, the line northwards from Alice Springs to Darwin was at last completed. The modern Ghan now travels the whole 3300km (more than 2000 miles) between Adelaide and Darwin.
Henry Quince, Australia
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