Nikau and Ti tree walk Piha

Ti tree Great Barrier

If you’re not an Australian and especially if you’ve never visited, images of the country you may conjure up might include the red earth, kangaroos, maybe a vast cattle station, Indigenous Australians, fellas drinking stubbies of XXXX with a cowboy booted foot resting upon a rail. However, most of inhabited Australia is an urban metropolis awash with fast food outlets, traffic, office workers. There are beaches with their surfers but mostly, the similarities with other western cities are more apparent than the differences. Indeed, Melbourne has created one of the finest coffee cultures in the World and we, as Australian residents, are becoming quite the needy children tugging on the apron strings of our baristas. Living in the Outback, as I do, does not seem to have quashed the want of a Melbourne cuppa.

Tennant Creek, my home for two years, reflects that imagery of our imaginations. The ‘Golden Heart’ of the Territory is a town with a population of around 3,000. Its nearest neighbour, our regional centre, is Alice Springs just 505 kilometres south. The Alice as it’s known locally, is the third largest town in the Northern Territory after the capital, Darwin, and a Darwin suburb once distinct, Palmerston. Ten per cent of Territorians live here which is a whopping 25,000 people. To get to the next biggest town you’d have to travel 1500kms back north to Darwin/Palmerston or the same south to Adelaide. Don’t even try and go in any other direction since you’d run out of bitumen pretty quickly and food and water shortly after. But for us outbackers, a town of this size is an urban nirvana. There might not be the ocean or surfers but there are fast food outlets, there are office workers, maybe not traffic, but there is more than one set of traffic lights and multiple roundabouts too. There’s a shopping centre, a car wash, sports clubs, a reptile park. You can eat at dozens of restaurants, drink in a variety of bars, and have a proper coffee made by a real barista in a café that wouldn’t actually look out of place in Melbourne. However, I’m going to talk about a stop en route from Tennant to Alice, the only stop where one can purchase a coffee without putting a token in a machine.

The journey south to Alice from Tennant Creek takes in one, largely straight road, and by outback standards is relatively short coming in at under 4 ½ hours. With Northern Territory speed limits a generous 130km/hr, the ute’s cruise control does the bulk of the work. The landscape is mostly flat, with the red soil dominated by grasses and low, scraggly shrubs. With the inevitable clear blue skies above, the reds, greens and yellows of our roadside seem sharp. After 80km of traveling south the road begins to weave through low rises and then Karlu Karlu, or the Devil’s Marbles, a collection of oversized boulders perched perilously upon craggy rock formations appears. An incredibly popular spot during the cooler winter months with the Grey Nomads, the caravanning retirees who crawl up and down the arterial Stuart Highway which ultimately runs from Adelaide on the South Australian coast to Darwin on the Northern Territory’s, Karlu Karlu contains many sacred spots to the various Indigenous language groups that once lived their semi-nomadic lifestyles around the region, with this spot being a neutral meeting place. Now, the only meetings are those around a camp fire as the nomads share a bottle of Shiraz outside their luxury motor homes and goose-necked caravans.

Just south again is the first of three roadhouses before reaching the only town between Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, Ti Tree. Town is a bit of a loose definition, it’s more of a community that is on the highway. Communities are the term given to Aboriginal population centres and depending on their size, which can vary anywhere from tens of inhabitants to a thousand, will dictate what services exist. For most these may include a medical centre, visited on a roster basis by health professionals, maybe a small school, a football field, even a shop. Those that reside on the highway such as Ti Tree or Elliott, 250km to the north of Tennant Creek, might have a pub, a roadhouse, a police station, maybe even employment opportunities. Ti Tree has all of them for its population of around 150 but also, for the cattle stations and other regional communities nearby which swells the population to nearer 1000, as well as those passing through. For me, it’s my coffee stop and a time to stretch the legs, since they’ve not touched a pedal since leaving Tennant Creek. Even my hands have barely had to move from the ‘ten to two’ position on the wheel. I say coffee but really that’s an affront to baristas the world over who would not recognise what I’m drinking as anything less than a turgid, too hot, too milky, distinctly not coffee-flavoured, cup of bile. Of course, this does not stop me from having one every time I pass through. I think my relationship with outback coffee is akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

Ti Tree not only offers a roadhouse, a place for fuel, beer and counter meals but also a general store and home to my hot beverages. The store is a hundred yards or so down a dirt track and though not much of a diversion took me two Ti Tree stops to make the most of. Before this, the roadhouse that sits conveniently in the middle of the town just a casual braking and gentle steer to the left away provided my caffeinated beverages. Or actually, they didn't. The first time the machine had broken which is forgivable. When things go wrong out here, it can takes weeks to fix. A Mac owning friend had to wait two weeks for it to be repaired as the IT guy in town only does PCs, so off to Alice Springs the Mac went and then a spare part needed to be sent on the 3hr plane journey from one of the major cities and then get fitted and, well, you can see my point. The second time though, really got my goat.