Palm Valley is a beautiful spot, and you can imagine how it would be an oasis of green in a barren landscape during the summer. It’s home to the Red Cabbage Palm (Livistonia mariae; for my dad) due to the unique conditions that exist for about 2km along the valley.
The narrow valley protects the vegetation from drying winds, there’s a stable deposit of silt for their shallow roots and, most importantly, there’s a permanent water source from both rainwater percolating through the surrounding sandstone hills and a water table level with the valley floor.
After walking through Palm Valley, rather than taking the direct route back to Alice Springs we headed off road again through the Owen Springs Reserve, stopping to camp in Lawrence Gorge about half way along the track. It’s free to camp along the river bed and there are no facilities and no people, which is how we prefer things (being anti-social types!). The track through the reserve closely follows the path taken by explorer John McDouall Stuart, the first white man to cross the centre of the continent from south to north. He succeeded in crossing in 1862 and the opening up of the land soon followed, first with the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) from Adelaide to Darwin, then by settlers and their cattle. Owen Springs was the site of the earliest cattle station in Central Australia when two log huts were built in 1873 by William Gilbert. The Old Homestead replaced the timber with stone in 1886/7, but the site was abandoned in the 1950s when the then owners (Betty and Ron Thompson) relocated 20km north.
A working station until 2002 with 8,000 to 10,000 head of cattle, it was eventually bought by the Northern Territory Government and turned into a nature reserve. SPOT
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