Via wiredog, GPS, Australia and tourism.
I rarely mourned the lack of GPS because I spent a lot of time in the countryside, which is essentially uninhabited and where one is pleased to be on any road whatsoever. There are only about four or five roads on the entire continent, including the Stuart Highway and the Sturt Highway. There are dirt roads--"tracks," they call them, accurately--that go for 1,000 miles across the bush. When you pull out of the Alice Springs airport, a road sign says, "Alice Springs 10" and "Darwin 1502." Another sign says simply, "Adelaide," with an arrow, failing to note that the distance to Adelaide is about 4 percent of the circumference of the planet, by my calculation.Australia is an easy target for this kind of humourous commentary. But then again that is often part of Australia's charm, the romanticism of an untamed (mythical) frontier still existing.
