Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Known as Stuart until 31 August 1933, the name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd, wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. The area is known as Mparntwe to its original inhabitants, the Arrernte, who have lived in the Central Australian desert in and around what is now Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years.

About Alice Springs, Australia in brief

Summary Alice Springs, AustraliaAlice Springs is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Known as Stuart until 31 August 1933, the name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd, wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. The area is known as Mparntwe to its original inhabitants, the Arrernte, who have lived in the Central Australian desert in and around what is now Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years. Alice Springs had an urban population of 26,534 in June 2018, having declined an average of 1. 16% per year the preceding five years. The town straddles the usually dry Todd River on the northern side of the MacDonnell Ranges. Temperatures in Alice Springs can vary, with an average maximum in summer of 35. 6 °C and an average minimum in winter of 5. 1  °C. The town’s population accounts for approximately 10 per cent of the population of theNorthern Territory. The Aboriginal name for Alice Springs is MparNTwe. Three major groups — Western, Eastern, and Central ArrerNTe — live in Central Australia, their traditional land including the area of Alice Springs and MacDonnellRanges. In 1861–62, John McDouall Stuart led an expedition through Central Australia,. to the west of what later became Alice Springs, thereby establishing a route from the south of the continent to the north. A white settlement named after Stuart was started ten years later with the construction of a repeater station on the Australian Overland Telegraph Line, which linked Adelaide to Darwin and Great Britain.

It was not until alluvial gold was discovered at Arltunga, 100 kilometres east of the present Alice Springs in 1887 that any significant European settlement occurred. The Alice Springs Telegraph Station was sited near what was thought to be a permanent waterhole in the normally dryTodd River, named Alice Springs by W. W. Mills after the wife of Charles Todd, who was the driving force for constructing the OTL. The first substantial building was the Stuart Town Gaol in Parson’s Street; this was built in 1909, when the town had a European population of fewer than 20 people. The original mode of transportation in the British-Australian Frontier was camel trains, operated by immigrants from Pathan tribes in the North-West Frontier of then-British India. Until the mid-1930s, the town’s European population was about 40 men. It’s not until 1929, when train line to Central Australia was built, that the town began to grow, that Alice was officially known as Alice Springs. It is now the seat of the government for the Central Territory of Central Australia  now-defunct Territory of Northern Territory. Until 31 August 1932, the city was officially the town of Stuart, known as the Stuart until then as the town was known as The Alice or simply Alice, now colloquially known as simply Alice.