Alice Springs: Place of myth and legend

Alice Springs is surrounded by a vast, brutal emptiness. Photo / Supplied

To the left is the hazy white outline of the spy base that put Australia on the Cold War's nuclear map, helped dump bombs on Saddam Hussein and now does who knows what.

To the right, rising from either side of a plateau that aeons ago was the bed of a vast inland sea, are the eroded remains of the base of a mountain range that once made today's Himalayas look like hillocks.

Directly below us, sprawled ominously on an ancient rise, are the strangely intact remains of a light aircraft that failed to make it over the top. The bloke who is telling us all this is a Welshman.

Where else could you be but Alice Springs and the red immensity of central Australia where legends, myths and truth as strange as fiction come as naturally to modern man as they did to the local Arrernte people and their Dreamings.

We were met off The Ghan, whisked through the outskirts of Alice, between the sheer rock bluffs of Heavitree Gap, and across Chinaman's Creek to the airport.

Forrest Shore, a 30-year-old peripatetic pilot who prefers the dry ochre outback to his own misty homeland, is waiting with an updated version of those dragonfly-looking choppers that you see in the M*A*S*H television series.

We lift through rising thermals into a vividly clear blue and, across the reds and blues of the land and the walls of the MacDonnell Ranges, we can see the white domes of Pine Gap, the joint US-Australian spy base.

Forrest keeps well away from the invisible line that rings the base. Cross it, he tells us, and there will be a cluster of humourless men waiting to take us and the chopper apart when we land.

Instead, we fly above Alice, an oasis where huge, natural, underground reservoirs mean there are no water restrictions, and where the market with its indigenous art and local crystals add to the romance of the red centre.

It sits between the East and West MacDonnells, which stretch for hundreds of kilometres in each direction and whose 60 degree outer slopes are the last remnants of an ancient mountain range.

The Arrernte people believe they are the bodies of Yeperenye, giant caterpillars of the Dreaming.

We fly over ridges capped with buffel grass - a tropical plant introduced for feed that has since run rampant - and above the sheer rock cleavage of Simpson's Gap, a crossroads of the Arrernte's Dreaming trails.

"As far as your eyes can focus, there's nothing," Forrest says.

"South of here it's completely empty."

We see that as we return - but it is a compelling, brutally beautiful and deeply moving emptiness that from the air is breathtaking in its vastness.