THE TEUTONIC VISITORS
“… Alice Springs was visited by a group of 15 German dancers… “
They have gone now, thank God.
Vanished into that European vacuum from whence they came.
I should explain to you that in recent times Alice Springs was visited by a group of 15 German dancers innovative dancers, if you don’t mind who came here with a film crew to produce a TV documentary of the ladies prancing in the great Australian outback.
You should be made to clearly understand that each of the dancers was a raving prima donna, temperamental, and somewhat of a pain in the unmentionables. As their location manager, I had to organise the group’s accommodation at a dysfunctional cattle station about 130 kms north-west of Alice Springs.
Their leader, known as Inge, airily informed me that the dancers and self had journeyed to Australia to – quote – ‘extend their personal boundaries’ unquote.
With this end in mind, I deliberately housed the visitors in a crude stone homestead with a wood stove, big fireplace and hired sleeping bags.
It soon became evident that the German women were not going to extend any boundaries at all, personal or otherwise. Nothing pleased them. The dingoes howling in the hills were frightening and prevented them from getting their beauty sleep. The nights were too cold. The days were too hot. The dunnies were too far away, requiring at night a torch and an escort. The cooking arrangements were primitive. There were no shops nearby. Swinging an axe at the woodheap was too dangerous. The tank water tasted funny. One lady hacked to pieces a perfectly harmless garden hose thinking it was a snake.
Of a day, dressed in skimpy leotards and whatsits, the dancers smiled unblinkingly at the cameras as they oh-so-carelessly cavorted through the spinifex, pranced happily in dry creek beds and rocky gorges, and to all outward appearances seemed to be relishing their stay in outback Australia.
When the camera were off, however, their collective faces turned grim and threatening. The flies were a nuisance. Someone had tripped over a log. Another had stubbed her toe on a rock. Someone else’s makeup was running down her jowls in little cosmetic rivers.
One afternoon, to relieve their boredom, Inge announced that she was going to escort them on an overland expedition to a waterhole about three kilometres away. Halfway there, Inge grew weak and said she would sit on a rock and wait. When the other ladies did eventually return, Inge was nowhere to be seen. With a stick, she had scratched something into the dirt in German. Translated, it said: “I am not afraid.” And then, presumably, she had run all the way back to the main camp to prove how unafraid she really was.
After spending two weeks in the bush, and still with their boundaries intact, the visitors gratefully returned to civilisation. In Alice Springs, they drank champagne, splurged at restaurants, shopped till they dropped, and gradually very gradually stopped whinging about their sufferings in the bush.
Just as gradually, a subtle transformation occurred in their thinking. An air of romance tinted their memories and a certain nostalgia crept into their reminiscences. By the time they winged their way back to Bremen and Hamburg, the group were waxing lyrically about their grand outback adventures and were looking forward to telling their families and friends of their glorious stay on a real cattle station.
Ever since this unfortunate excperience, I constantly remind myself of the warning once issued by the American traveller, Mark Twain, who said: ‘One should never judge a country by its tourists.’
