Matthew Abraham: If aliens are here at least they can avoid South Australia’s roads

How come SA has some of the world’s best beaches but are served by the worst rural tourism infrastructure in the country — Matthew Abraham ponders our regional roads, the arrival of aliens and Monty Python is his latest Sunday Mail column.

• Push to salvage Wild Eyes solo-bid yacht and build a memorial
• Professor defends proposal Oumuamua is an alien probe
• Tender called for 16km duplication of South Rd to Sellicks Beach
• Holiday hangout of South Australian celebrities

In the moonlight, the treated pine posts from the clothesline glowed like a crucifix.

They reminded me of the cross on the luminous, plastic holy water font that hung in our sleep-out as kids.

But that was the 1950s, when having a glow-in-the-dark crucifix in a child’s bedroom was perfectly normal.

Well, it was normal in our childhood home, at least.

The clothesline was in the backyard of our rented holiday house in Normanville, playground to the other half of Adelaide not across the gulf on Yorke Peninsula over Christmas and New Year.

The street frontage of this happy retreat was Burnside by the sea — bitumen licked clean, cement kerbs, streetlights with no overhead powerlines.

Unlike Burnside, it was so quiet you could hear yourself think.

Retired men sprayed WD40 on their caravan wheel nuts. It was always the men dicking around in their carports or front gardens.

Holiday musings from idyllic Normanville Beach

But around the back, it was a different story, because there was the great Australian outback, writ small.

Impossibly beautiful banksias, wispy sheoaks, eucalypts, flowering succulents and regular pine trees were thriving and competing for territory in the dry, red sandy soil.

And brown snakes. They thrived too. And spiders. No drop bears, but bloody big ants dropped from the leaves on windy nights.

So stumbling around in the inky Fleurieu dark with a plastic basket full of wet bathers and towels, trying to locate the path to the clothesline, was a fraught affair.

It was a joy to finally discover the two rough wooden crosses with six sturdy wires strung between them, and peg the duds up to dry in the night breeze, a good 10C cooler than Adelaide.

It was a fine place to contemplate the mysteries of the universe, particularly the odd appearance in our solar system of a “spaceship” named Oumuamua, discovered on October 19, 2017, “suspiciously close to Earth”, to quote Israeli journalist Oded Carmeli.

Sent by aliens? An artist's impression of the interstellar visitor Oumuamua

It was 33 million kilometres away from us, which still counts as suspiciously close, so scientists got a bit of a squiz at it before it vanished.

Oumuamua is the first object we have discovered to have passed through our solar system yet identified as definitely originating outside it.

The head of Harvard University’s astronomy department, Professor Abraham Loeb, a genius in anyone’s language, has published a controversial scientific paper arguing that Oumuamua’s unprecedented trajectory, speed, extreme hyperbolic orbit and brightness raises the real possibility it could be a “spaceship” launched by an intelligent species of aliens.

As Professor Loeb explains, during its visit to our solar system, the thin, shiny, possibly pancake-shaped object accelerated — an acceleration not explained by the sun’s force of gravity. And not explained by anything else scientists can think of.

Loeb argues that the civilisation that may have developed this “solar sail”, a craft propelled by the sun’s rays, has long since vanished.

“If to judge by our own behaviour, it seems to me that the likeliest explanation is that civilizations develop the technologies that destroy them,” Professor Loeb says.

“Sails like these are launched but they no longer have anyone to broadcast back to.” Hold that thought.

But there are many other, smaller, mysteries to ponder in the dark, like the question of holiday house pegs. Why are they always broken? Why are no two pegs ever the same?

And how come we have the world’s best beaches served by the worst rural tourism infrastructure in Australia?

Why on earth would we want to waste federal taxpayers money on vanity projects such as trams down Unley or Prospect roads, when most regional roads are shamefully neglected?

One supposedly flat section of Main South Rd, on the approach to Sellicks Hill, is so undulating it’s like riding the Mad Mouse.

It’s patently dangerous and it’s been like that for years.

And why would anyone consider retrieving the upturned hull of Wild Eyes, that round-the-world teenager’s yacht found drifting off Kangaroo Island, and turning it into a “memorial”? To what? Just sink it.

The hull of Wild Eyes, discovered off Kangaroo Island.

Don’t we have enough rotting hulks cluttering the joint already, including the City of Adelaide wreck at Port Adelaide and the marooned wave generator that has been stuck offshore at Carrickalinga for so long the local kids dress up in cardboard mock-ups of the thing for the local Christmas pageant?

So many mysteries under a big night sky, so little time. We’re such a crazy lot we surely must have broken the boredom for the aliens sailing Oumuamua through celestial infinity.

We, of course, have been mostly too busy blowing each other up, trashing our lovely blue planet and cutting bus services to pay much attention to the interstellar visit that Professor Loeb says could be one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

Let’s hope there’s intelligent life up there because, to quote Monty Python, most days there’s bugger all down here on Earth.