In Alice Springs the Todd River provided a dry bed in which mothers gave birth.

According to the Dreamtime tales, Moon created female babies and Lizard brought male children.

Since the afterbirth contained a portion of the newborn's soul, the waste was buried. This shielded the spirit from animals and other spirits that might take it away.

Infants were found in hollow logs, caves or in the shade of scrub when a woman's time was near. The souls of babies also congregated in the branches of the coolibah tree and children dropped from the branches into waiting arms.  

While all this stumbling upon hidden babies may sound romantic, Aborigines certainly were ambivalent about childbirth. A woman who gazed too long upon Moon would be cursed by having to bear twins.

And any woman who dared to play the didgeridoo would be cursed by becoming pregnant. Fortunately, I have dodged that particular curse to date.

In a pub one evening an Aboriginal woman named Melody paused by my table to chat. Soon she asked me to meet her friends. They spoke Aboriginal Creole, a mix of English and local tribal languages.

Melody had been a teacher and a health counselor for the local tribes until her job had "gone down with the rain." 

"Down with the rain, shh." She hissed through her teeth and rocked on the barstool. "But I stay here, this my home. Not Alice, ya know, but out, ya know, outside." 

I nodded. She meant the outback, the wide expanse of desert that had become my temporary home. She fixed me with a slow, easy grin.   

"I'm no cradle rocker, neither!  I not born in hospital. I born over there." She gestured vaguely at one wall. "I born in riverbed, when it was dry, shh. My sons born here, too. They no cradle rocker, either. I go back to where I was born when time come. River dry then, too, shh."

Traditions live on even today.

  I returned to the Alice to purchase a didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument created when termites hollowed out a branch. Kinks and curves increase the richness of the sound.

Even though mine was straight it produced a wonderful mellow tone. A rough sprinkling of sand overlay white, red, brown and yellow bands as if a wind had blown up before the paint had dried.

The sound had haunted me for years after I had first heard a recording of the instrument accompanied by click sticks. Click sticks were a modernization of clap sticks, two boomerangs slapped together for rhythm. It would take me about two weeks to learn how to make a basic drone and another two weeks to learn cycle breathing.

 After another two years, I could finally play the instrument for over ten minutes at a time. That's considered pretty darned good, especially when you have to breath out and in at the same time in order to play continuously.  

 Not all Aussies were oblivious to the beauty of their land. The next morning I prepared my shower. A swimsuit maintained my modesty but otherwise I splashed unsheltered.

Performing such a basic and personal task under the sky further connected me with the earth. Bushes were in flower, one a faint purple and the other pink. Fuzzy golden wattle cushioned my feet against the red earth. Broken rock jittered through the ground like the bony spine of a flame dragon.

A ute pulled up as I drenched my body and the occupants honored me with more than one glance. The young couple's curiosity didn't bother me. The bus tour...now that bothered me.

The bus parked about 10 meters away, close enough that lathering any part of my body suddenly became an exhibition. I stared down a few fish-like gapers as they shuffled slowly, too slowly, after the tour guide. They gathered at the other end of the bay and gazed at the splendid outcropping I had commandeered for my toilet.

I scrubbed as discreetly as possible and just as I was ready to rinse the group shuffled back to the vehicle. Up rumbled another. Three bus loads of people ambled by before the shower was through. Ah, the wonders of two-way radio.

Dusk waltzed arm in arm with the cold. I lounged around the fire with an older couple who were camping in a trailer. The fire was the typical Australian-built inferno; they seemed to always build a bonfire even when an average blaze would have sufficed.

Then the couple boiled a giant billy, a kettle or pot used to heat water. We drank only a few cups of tea. Wood and water were both previous commodities in a desert landscape.

I had expected the average Australian to be more conservation minded. I assumed that the lack of wide-spread urbanization would have made their natural heritage easier to protect. Americans had lost so much that Australia seemed lucky to be able to recognize mistakes before they occurred.

I didn't know that much of the land had bent centuries ago. Herds of cattle and sheep had stripped away the poor grass and compacted the soil. Acres of trees had been uprooted so that pastures might grow. The pastures were so poor cattle and sheep stations had to be tens of thousands of acres big to support any kind of herd.

I kept quiet. America had a too-similar history.

After I had freshened up, a couple who had been camped in this one spot before me waved me over. They offered me a cuppa tea and bickies, or cookies. The Aussies called cookies sweet bisquits, and shortened nearly every word over one syllable down to something ending in -ie or y. Thus we had bickies.

Although elderly, the man insisted on collecting the firewood I would need for that night. I was a woman, you see, and he didn't want to see me hurt myself. Then he ratcheted into the desert on stiff legs.

Their generosity continued. Later they discovered I that my Coleman stove had broken the first week of the trip. I'd been cooking over an open fire ever since. They offered me a propane tank and burner which they never used.

Before going on this trip, I had given away many possessions. I had needed to lighten a life that had felt pretty cluttered. Although I had always tried to give freely during my life, in Oz I was flooded by gifts from near-total strangers.

Even a cuppa was more than just an offer to share tea or coffee. It was an invitation to share an evening, to spend time completely free of obligation. Nothing was expected in return except a laugh or a pat on the back.

I gradually understood that everything I had given, materially and spiritually, was being returned to me tenfold, a hundredfold.

One day I pulled over early to do laundry bush style. I washed my shorts and shirts in a bucket then draped them over a clothesline. The window frame of the car acted as one post while a tree was the other.

Sun and wind quickly pulled the moisture from my tiger-print undies. I left them to dry as I hiked deeper into the bush to answer the call of nature. If I wanted to make sure no stray drivers got an eyeful of my shiny butt cheeks, I had to do a lot of walking during the day. The thin scrub just didn't conceal much.

In this area, a rocky outcropping sheltered me from the neighboring trailer. I felt luck; this necessary activity was perpetually annoying. No matter how deeply I dug the pit nor how far my legs straddled, something always splashed my shoes.

Believe me, I tried a lot to avoid the spray. I adjusted the altitude of my squat. I leaned forward and back. I stopped halfway up slopes and faced up, down and sideways to no avail.

Even when my footwear escaped being splashed, a pink flood soon threatened to engulf one boot or the other. The only time I relieved myself in a carefree manner was after dark. If I couldn't see it, it must not have happened.

 After the British fellow admitted to having been scared by the deadly redback spider, I couldn't help but whip out the other favorite Aussie fable.

"Have you heard about the drop bears?"  I asked. "Oh, now there's another terrible bush peril. You know those fuzzy things that look like little bears?"

"Koalas," he said.

"Whatever. They live in trees and eat nothing but certain types of eucalyptus leaves." 

He nodded; this was common knowledge.

"Well," I said, "if it eats the wrong leaf it gets all woozy and drunk. And sometimes the bear looses its grip and falls. Those drop bears may be small but they're muscular and heavy. Every year some poor, unfortunate tourist walks under a tree just as the bear tumbles down, is struck on the head and dies. Wise hikers always look up before passing under a tree out bush."

His laughter faded as I nodded sagely. For all I know, he still searches the trees for those elusive yet deadly drop bears.

My conversation with the British fellow shifted to the more amusing Aussie quirks. We laughed over the fabled redback spider. Cousin to America's black widow, this spider had a red mark on its back rather than its belly.

While many pioneers had fallen prey to the tiny fiend, antivenin and a long reaction period had reduced the spider's list of victims. The danger had been raised to mythic proportions by the Aussie sense of humor, though.

The redback tended to hang out where humans lived. Since many of their flush toilets had been build with separate outdoor entrances, the spider was often found under toilet seats. Sit down without looking, and you might be dealt an embarrassing death blow.

"I was very cautious when I first arrived," the British fellow said.

The person who had warned him about the spider hadn't said they're really only found in outdoor toilets. His first night at the hotel, he shoved the toilet door open so hard it crashed against the wall. He wanted to surprise any redbacks that might be running about the floor.

"I didn't see anything," he said, "but by that time I was almost hyperventilating, I was so scared. I saw that strip, that paper band on the seat, what does it say?"

"'Sanitized for your protection,'" I said.

"Yes, something like that, but it didn't fool me one bit."

He braced myself in the doorway, stretched out one leg and gave the toilet seat a mighty kick. He fully expected an enormous, hairy spider would leap out and bite him. For a whole week he held his urine for hours so he wouldn't risk having something bite his bum. 

The population this side of Never Never was so sparse, I navigated using only a map of the nation. Dots scattered like knuckle bones across the outback occasionally consisted of two or three shops but were often just roadhouses dropped among the mulga.

Alice Springs was large for such a remote town. As I wandered the streets a young British fellow joined me on my hunt for the post office. After dropping our relatives postcards to assure them that we weren't dead yet, we went to a local café to share a cup of tea.

The young man's journey had begun with three friends, a shared car and shared expenses. Incessant bickering over who was paying for what had finally split the group apart. I had heard many similar tales from others, some of whose marriages had not survived the grand tour.

The Brit had decided to finish his travels by bus. But that choice had its own difficulties and he shared some of them with me.

"These bleedin' bus tours," he groused, "are worse than the fights. Cramped in a tiny seat, next to people I don't even like, all for twenty minutes or an hour at the destination."

"Yea," I said, "must be pretty awful. I kinda feel sorry for you."

"Good," he said, "because I feel sorry for me, too."