Someone has to go round at dusk and make the light happen. It is not glamorous work. It is one small correct action, repeated, and everything downstream depends on it — which is precisely how I feel about a fresh set of string.
This is one 40-foot (12 m) set of Head Sonic Pro in 17 gauge, 1.25 mm: a firm co-polyester monofilament cut for a single racquet. The thinner gauge is the feel gauge. It sinks into the ball, grabs it for spin, and gives you a clearer report back through the handle than 1.30 mm does, at the cost of some life span.
It is a control string above all — low launch angle, minimal string movement, no free power — so string it five to ten percent under your usual synthetic tension and let the bed do the softening. One set, one racquet, nothing left over to store.
Alice Springs is a town built on exactly my trade: a signal picked up and passed on.
We begin at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, low stone buildings under corrugated iron with wide verandas beside a dry sandy riverbed of white-trunked gums, put up in 1872 as one of twelve repeater stations on the Overland Telegraph Line.
That line ran some three thousand two hundred kilometres from Adelaide to Darwin and, by undersea cable to Java, joined Australia to Britain for the first time, cutting communication from months to hours. Twelve stations, each taking the signal in and sending it on.
The surveyor William Mills named the waterhole in the Todd after Alice, wife of the superintendent Charles Todd, and the town a few kilometres south took the name. From 1932 to 1942 the station was used as a government institution holding Aboriginal children of mixed descent removed from their families, and that belongs in the same account as everything else.
Then Anzac Hill — Untyeyetweleye to the Arrernte — a low rocky rise above the middle of town carrying a plain stone obelisk dedicated in 1934 and extended since to later conflicts. From the top you see the whole grid of low buildings inside its red ring of the MacDonnell Ranges, with Heavitree Gap the only natural way in from the south.
The hill matters in Arrernte tradition as a site associated with a female ancestral figure, and dawn services are held up there.
Then the Royal Flying Doctor Service base beside the airstrip, opened in 1939 and covering a stretch of desert larger than many countries.
John Flynn founded the service in 1928 because isolation was turning ordinary illness and injury into death, and it ran on two inventions: the aeroplane, and Alfred Traeger's pedal-powered radio, which let a station with no mains electricity call for help. Medical chests went out to remote properties with numbered contents that could be prescribed over the air.
Flynn ended up on the twenty-dollar note.
And we finish at the Araluen Cultural Precinct west of the centre — gallery, museum, theatre and the Strehlow Research Centre among desert gums, with sacred trees standing in the grounds.
It holds a major group of works by Albert Namatjira, the Arrernte watercolourist whose paintings of these ranges made him the first Aboriginal artist to win national fame in the 1940s, and who was granted citizenship while most of his people were not.
The Hermannsburg school is there, and Papunya Tula, whose emergence in the early 1970s began the whole Western Desert painting tradition.
You will use this set everywhere from a hard court in Alice Springs at forty degrees to an indoor hall in Adelaide at the far end of that old telegraph line, and by the way, it is also perfect for a walk up Anzac Hill before anybody else is out, which is the hour I know best.
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