The spectacular MacDonnell Ranges, Northern Territory. Picture: Tourism NT Source: Supplied A view of the Alice Springs township, Northern Territory. The Queen Adelaide restaurant on The Ghan. Picture: Great Southern Rail Source: Supplied MEMORIES of childhood are reignited by the sound of metal on metal as the Ghan leaves Darwin for Alice Springs. The tropics open up before us, vast and beautiful, with pandanus and merrepen palms, yellow grasses and white ash scattered beneath scalded eucalyptus trees. We cross the Elizabeth River, fat and lazy, and pass through Adelaide River, where people gather trackside and wave excitedly at the shiny metal serpent slicing through town. The train stops at Katherine, where mangoes grow so prolifically they're sometimes left to rot on the ground. There's a canoe on the roof of the servo that was washed there during the flood of 1998, but no sign of the Russian farmers who came here almost a century before that to grow strawberries and peanuts. "They all got rounded up in 1939 and were probably taken off to Cowra," says the coach driver taking a group of us to Nitmiluk National Park (Katherine Gorge) for a side-trip. He's referring to the World War II-era internment camp in Cowra, NSW, which housed prisoners of war and people who had migrated from non-allied countries. "They never did come back," he sighs. That night, I watch Katherine recede into the twilight and sip the Baileys nightcap placed on my night stand while I was eating dinner. This wood-panelled, cocooning space, the crisp cotton sheets and jacquard bedspread and the click-clacking of wheels are all soporific inducements to a childlike sleep. I wake in the early hours to find the train has stopped. Outside, the stars are pinpricks in the sky and spears of spinifex are illuminated by the undercarriage lights. By morning the termite mounds have morphed from elongated towers to squat mounds of red sand and the MacDonnell Ranges have materialised as if from nowhere. The Ghan will journey on to Adelaide, but I get off at Alice Springs to embark on one of Great Southern Rail's classic side-trips - Tracking the Red Centre. My guide, Page Dosen of SEIT Outback Australia, suggests I spend some time in the Alice before setting off for Uluru. It's good advice, for there's something deeply affecting about this place. I can feel its heart beating just beyond the curtain of crisp winter air. The Red Centre's stories are articulated here through the works of Albert Namatjira and other local artists, the Aboriginal artefacts at Mbantua Gallery and the local flora and fauna. "If you live around Alice Springs, you've got bearded dragons for pets, whether you like it or not," says Nadia Rosen, a handler at the Alice Springs Reptile Centre. They look tough, but they're as soft as a rubber toy. I hold one such creature, named Chulita ("pretty" in Spanish), and allow Zeus the python to wrap his powerful body around mine until our noses almost touch. There are plenty of these creatures on the rocky ranges and flat desert plains that circle Alice Springs; they loiter about the river red gums and ironwoods and hide in the buffel grass, an imported species that lies thick and fertile on the desert floor. South of Alice Springs is the Finke River, which has been travelling the same course for 300,000 years, making it the oldest in the world, Dosen says. When it rains, it fills up with nine species of fish, but despite the knot of purple clouds in the distance, the Finke meanders parched and impotent through the scrubby landscape. To reach Uluru we must turn west on to the Lasseter Highway; the desert is carpeted with a rain-fed proliferation of mulga scrub and spinifex, and the sky vibrates with the vivid arcs of a double rainbow and the burnished apricot of the setting sun. Dusk has drawn out the creatures of the Red Centre: a herd of camels, a dingo, a handsome family of brumbies with chestnut coats and black stockings and little black diamonds on their foreheads. We pull into Curtin Springs station, the last privately owned property along this road, and eat dinner beneath the original bough shed, a rudimentary structure that was the Severin family's home for three years when they first arrived here in 1956, a young couple and their three-year-old son marooned in an ocean of nothingness. For all the progress Peter and son Ashley have observed over the years, Australia's centre remains a mystery to them. "None of us really knows this country yet, we haven't been here long enough," Ashley says. Last year Dad and I found grasses we'd never seen before. Easier to measure is the change in the tourist traffic, for in those early years it was only the intrepid or the foolish who came looking for Uluru. "Six people drove down this road in the first year," says Lyndee Severin, Ashley's wife. Two stock agents from down south, two of their friends who [came to look for them because they] thought they'd perished, and two fair dinkum tourists. It's hard to reconcile the emptiness of that era with the bustle at Ayers Rock Village the next day. Happily, my SEIT (Spirit Emotion Intellect Task) guides help me avoid the crowds. Dosen shows me the Mutitjulu waterhole and retells the ancient Aboriginal legend of Wanampi, the rainbow serpent; Pip Shearman leads me on a walk around Uluru, pointing out the medicinal bloodwood tree, good for throat infections, and the vitamin C-rich arnguli (bush plum); and Kylie Charlton takes me through Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), where we spot the elusive wallaroo. As night descends, I join a small group of people atop a dune for an exclusive dinner at Tali Wiru. A didgeridoo player channels the haunting sounds of the outback, and we gaze upwards as a star talker tells the story of Ngurunderi and how he created all the species of fish and then placed his canoe in the sky so it could become the Milky Way. Tali Wiru, or beautiful dune, is a pedestal from which I can achieve some perspective on this vast and powerful land. The Red Centre is clothed in green, but next season's bushfires will surely burn it all away. Uluru has vanished into the blackness, and Kata Tjuta's curvaceous silhouette is but a memory. I can try to track this place, but it's just too old and wily to be contained. Catherine Marshall was a guest of Great Southern Rail and SEIT Outback Australia. Checklist Great Southern Rail offers a range of rail and sightseeing packages. More: greatsouthernrail.com.au; seitoutbackaustralia.com.au; ayersrockresort.com.au/ tali-wiru