Alice Springs isn’t just a stopover – it’s a revelation. On her return to the Red Centre, Rosamund Brennan discovers desert skies ablaze, art in the shade of Ghost gums, and adventure at every turn.

 

As night fell in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, I stood under a bruised-purple sky, watching Jupiter rise.

‘The anticipation is over’, our guide Andrew Fitzgerald said, as we stepped into the glass-domed observatory at Earth Sanctuary. One by one, we peered into the deep-sky telescope to track Jupiter’s arc, hovering beside the moon like a jewel stitched into velvet. 

Outside, the Milky Way spilled overhead like a river of silver dust. I’d never seen stars like this before. Not in any city. Not anywhere.

 

 

I’d been to Alice before, years ago; wide-eyed, heat-dazed, taken by the rust-red cliffs and dry riverbeds. But this time, it was the sky that cracked me open. 

Alice doesn’t just show you the wild. It lets you feel it. And if you’re lucky, it opens something inside you.

Drifting Over the Red Centre

At 4:30am, I peeled myself out of bed in the dark, questioning all my life choices. By 6am, I was 2,000 feet above the desert with Outback Ballooning, floating over red dirt as first light spilled across the West MacDonnell Ranges.

We passed over Owen Springs and Undoolya Stations, watching the landscape change beneath us – belts of mulga and gum trees, the Alice Springs power station catching the sun, Pine Gap just visible on the horizon.

From up here, everything felt suspended, hushed, luminous, weightless. There was no engine noise. No chatter. Just the hiss of the burner and the sound of canvas shifting overhead.

Below, brumbies stirred and the desert glowed in soft golds, mauves, and deep red shadow.

After we landed, the ground crew popped a bottle of champagne in the dust. The tradition of a toast dates back to the very first balloonists in 18th-century France, who offered bubbly to nervous farmers after landing in their fields.

I raised my glass to the sky, still warming in the east. A slow, golden hush settled over everything. If only all mornings started like this, I’d never sleep in again.

Painting Between the Branches

The next morning, I found myself cross-legged in the dry creek bed at Honeymoon Gap, with a paintbrush in hand, shaded by a canopy of swaying Ghost gums. Artist Anna Dakin, who runs Art Tours Australia, moved quietly between us, encouraging loose lines and observation over perfection.

‘Painting is a way of paying attention’, she said. ‘It helps people see what’s already here more intimately.’

As a warm-up, she had us sketch the negative spaces – not the Ghost gums themselves, but the shapes of the sky between their branches. It shifted something in me. I started to see the sky not as background, but as the thing that held everything else in place.

I dipped my brush into cobalt blue – the same bright, periwinkle shade that Albert Namatjira once painted with, capturing the desert air in washes of impossible light. As the colour bloomed across the paper, the rest began to take shape; the slender reach of the gum branches, the curve of the gorge, the way shadows nestle into stone.

I wasn’t trying to replicate the scene. I just wanted to see it more clearly.

 

Where the Rocks Catch Fire

That evening, I set out in a 4WD with Bill Wilcox from Sandrifter Safaris towards Rainbow Valley, a striking geological site about 75km south of Alice Springs. We rumbled down a salmon-pink gravel track flanked by mallee, mulga, spinifex, and Desert oak, with cattle snoozing by the roadside.

Rainbow Valley doesn’t rise; it erupts. Sandstone cliffs burst from the claypan in bands of ochre, cream, and iron-red.

‘Get up close and you’ll see the sculptures Mother Nature’s provided’, Bill said, pointing to a section of honeycombed cliff face. ‘That one’s our local Sistine Chapel.’

 

We wandered across the cracked claypan, its red surface fractured like ancient pottery left out to dry. Fairy martins had built hornet-shaped mud nests in the overhangs. One outcrop jutted into a profile.

‘That’s our NT Mount Rushmore’, Bill said. ‘There’s even a face up there keeping an eye on things.’

The colours shifted again as the sun dropped lower; now copper, now blush pink, now plum.

As the light drained from Rainbow Valley, I thought about everything this trip had shown me; the colours, the silence, the stories written into sky and stone.

In Mparntwe/Alice Springs, the wild doesn’t shout. It lingers. It reveals itself slowly, if you’re paying attention.

I’ll be back.

Lose Yourself in the Red Centre

The author was a guest for this article so that they could try all of the experiences for themself. Check out our Editorial Standards for more info on how we approach these partnerships.