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The larger venue was Australia. The more focused venue was a specific character of Australia Alice Springs.

In Australia you don't just drive up the road to anywhere. Almost everywhere requires a plane, even though flying from place to place is rather like turning sections of a tour guide nothing connects to anything else. You must imagine the connections as you watch miles of outback pass beneath the plane.

Nevertheless, we had arrived in the center of the continent and had, in our minds, visions of what we expected. Neville Shute's book, "A Town called Alice," was my guide so I expected immediately to see an ice-cream parlor.

What we did see was the River Todd a bustling stream of pure sand. Unfortunately, we had missed the excitement there by a day.

Each year the Henley-on-Todd Regatta is held, modeled on the Henley-on-Thames Regatta back home in Britain. Eights and fours are raced over set river courses from bridge to bridge between the great Eucalyptus gum trees. However, since the regatta is usually staged when there is no water in the riverbed, the crews race with their shells suspended around their waists. Some entries even have sails. Winning is a major achievement of course but the real day is a great party with more beer being consumed than water under the Thames bridges at Henley.

However, as I said, we arrived one day too late for the race so we walked across the deep sandy bed of the Todd into Alice. There we first found what we were looking for a bar. This one fitted our vision of the Red Center of Australia to a tee with a corrugated iron roof, straw on the floor, a set of rough characters lined up against the bar and music.

The music came from a three-man group a lead guitarist, a guy playing a fiddle, and another smoking while playing the mouthorgan. They were all bearded with mounds of unruly hair emerging under sweat-stained broad-brimmed Aussie hats. None looked under fifty and we were prepared to believe they played outback music as a relief from shearing sheep.

While we drank a Fosters and listened to the music we noticed that the other clients were periodically going to a large wooden barrel full of unshelled peanuts, so we also took handfuls to complement the beer. Soon a pile of shells grew next to the line of glasses.

Now, my wife is a neat and tidy Flemish Belgian so her pile of shells grew neatly while mine, following the practice of the local drinkers at the bar, soon fell over the edge of the rough wooden table onto the floor beside our bench. I had noticed that what we had taken as straw on the floor was really a spreading of crushed peanut shells.

It took my wife two more Fosters before I noticed that her pile of shells had stopped growing and she was surreptitiously guiding each shell to the edge of the table. Then suddenly she said, "What the " and swept the remainder of the pile onto the floor.
That's when I knew she really had reached the center of Australia.

Learn more about this author, John Graham.
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