Tanya Heaslip

The other Macdonald Ranges that run east to west, they're enormous and they're ancient and craggy and there's this big split between them that the dry Todd River runs through where Alice Springs is situated.

It's usually dry.

The Todd's full of water at the moment, but we've had rain.

But the smell, that dry air of the desert and then the eucalypt from the gum trees along the creek beds and the sound of crickets and cicadas at night,

stars, huge starry skies.

It's just magical.

It's a very mystical ancient land.

It's hard to describe what the air feels like in the outback.

And that's a strange thing to say what the air feels like, but it feels distinctly different than it does in coastal Australia.

I don't know, you sense the expanse of the world and the quietness of it and the dryness of the air.

And you feel like it sort of goes like that all the way up into space or something.

Just space and expanse is the feel I get when I'm out there.

It's a very good description.

You're in the middle of nowhere.

1,600 k's to the south and to the north from any other major city, more to the east and west.

There's just nothing.

There's hundreds and hundreds of miles of...

of space and emptiness and this ancient Indigenous land.

And this land was once the bottom of the sea.

So it's so old and all these ranges that are craggy and folded have been folded by the geology of time and it feels ancient and isolated.