Australia: Out of pocket in the outback

Until now, the most famous thing the small Australian wheatbelt community of Parkes could boast was a massive radio telescope on the outskirts of town known locally, with typical Australian reduction, as ‘The dish’. Nationally recognizable, the dish was the one thing that connected Parkes and, by extension, Australia, to the world and beyond. Moonshots have been traced and tracked from Parkes. Visiting US citizens – astronauts and their counterparts from Nasa – would periodically add foreign dash to Parkes’s determinedly middle-Australia ethos.