Here are some pictures from my trip from Melbourne to Adelaide, Adelaide to Alice Springs, Kings Canyon and Kata Tjuta and Uluru, Alice to Katherine to Darwin, and Kakadu. This is Percy's Bar, the corner of our block in Melbourne, dim in the predawn. The Overland takes ten hours to get to Adelaide. The scenery was fresh green from the autumn rains. We had some rain, too!
I stayed overnight in Adelaide, and paid the Botanic Gardens an early morning visit before the midday departure of the Ghan. It was, of course, autumnal... very nice contrast with my last visit, half a year ago. The Ghan - oops, the train staff never failed to say "the legendary Ghan" too us up past Port Augusta, the northernmost point of Spencer Bay - 
the last body of water I'd see until I'd crossed the continent south to north! Vast country in both directions, the Flinders Ranges in the distance below. 
Next morning the land had turned a sort of ochry red (the same color as the supposedly "pink city" of Jaipur), and we crossed several dry river beds on our way to the Center. 
In Alice Springs a friend of a friend of a friend (indeed the friend of two different friends of friends) took me to the telegraph station around which the settlement grew lay. Sunset shadows stretched long and a rock wallaby said hello! All around the ripply ranges of the "caterpillar dreaming" of the indigenous population.
Next day it was off to Kings Canyon, a stunning landscape, a bumpy moonscape of beehive-shaped conglomerate which fell off into a deep canyon with sheer pink walls (above) and at its center a narrow valley full of water and trees known as the Garden of Eden (whose water you've seen).
From there on to Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). It's too time-consuming to keep formatting, so here are a bunch of pictures, make of them what you will!
Off in the distance our first views of Uluru (Ayers Rock), whose strange scaly skin looks different from every angle and in every kind of light.
Back in Alice Springs I went to the Desert Museum (where I heard the amazing Djukurpa described yesterday). It also has a fantastic birds
of prey show (at right a fan-tail kite), a "nocturnal house" where you can see marvels like the thorny devil above, which looks more like a manga-inspired toy than a real 
animal, and some of the flowers which will soon blanket the desert around Uluru...Back on to the legendary Ghan, which has only gone north to Darwin since early 2004, although it's been planned since the 1880s. (Notice the red termite mounds among the blurry gums out the train window.)
It stops for a few hours in Katharine, where I went on a little "whistlestop" canoe excursion with some people I'd met on the tour to Uluru, and was befriended by a little red dragonfly. 
And then after desert dryness the tropical ocean breezes of Darwin! Darwin too has a Botanical Garden, lovely coastlines with lodes of ochre used for millennia by Aboriginal artists... and in the Anglican Cathedral someone has interpreted the signs of the Evangelists in a way evoking local (and ancient) Aboriginal art. Here are a few snaps...
And last but certainly not least the ancient ancient landscape of Kakadu national park, which I'll let you wander your way through... you'll see the Escarpment of 2 billion year old rock which can look like the ruins of ancient fortresses, some of the rock paintings at Ubirr, cathedral termite mounds, a spider, a screw palm, the consequences of cyclone and flood on a riverbank forest, and the moon - if not quite in that order.
