Top End - Darwin
Monday, August 26, 2013 at 09:36PM It’s like another planet up here, and a warm one. Not that the mercury’s so high– my benchmark based on Melbourne summers being so much hotter than it used to be – just sticky. I’m not normally a sweater, but here I’m aware of a film of perspiration coating me the minute I walk out the door and away from the air con.
Thursday afternoon I have a swim in the part of the harbour that’s walled off to keep out crocs and stinging jellyfish. It’s a five-minute walk from where we are staying, and there’s a glass lift that takes you down to beach level.
That night we go to famous Mindil Beach, mooching around the markets, eating souvlaki and drinking mango smoothies and watching a glorious clichéd big orange sun going down reflectingly over the sea. The locals are more impressed by a heavy black build up of rain clouds to the southwest. Later that evening, standing on the balcony of our flat we watched the rain pounding down, abrupt and violent and unseasonal.
Directions in Darwin are confusing. Here we are, at the very top of the country; we should be facing out to Papua New Guinea and East Timor. In fact, the peninsula that is Darwin is such a complicated shape that the big picture windows of the flat we are staying in face south. The morning after we watch the sun go down on Mindil Beach, I watch it coming up from our balcony.
Before that sun gets too high, I load up with water and head off for a couple of hours, walking to the end of Stokes Hill Wharf, back along the sea wall, through Bicentennial Park the length of the Esplanade and back through town, stopping a lot, and taking every side trip I can find.
The rampant vegetation, which I swear seems greener after the heavy rain the night before, cascades crazily down the steep slopes to the wild, mangrovey beaches below, and every time I see steps down these slopes, I follow them.
The first lot takes me to the Deckchair Cinema and a walk that celebrates the women of the Northern Territory with photos, mosaics and art works. The second takes me to the sandy part of Lameroo Beach – such a secret, lonely-feeling cove it’s hard to believe I am five minutes walk from the CBD. On my way back up to the park I meet a fisherman coming down; apart from him, there’s nobody and nothing except a sodden, washed up beach towel.
My third side trip is into Doctors Gully. It’s heavy with moisture there; thick vegetation growing down to a little creek and despite the concrete steps I am walking down, I imagine that I get a tiny feel of what this place must have felt like before my ancestors arrived. A group of Indigenous people are sitting on the walkway and we say hello and that’s the only human sound down in this dim, moist gully.
At the top it’s all contemporary western city and I walk ‘home’ along Smith St with its Mall which is just a mall in any generic western city, with its Cotton On and McDonalds and cafes promising perfect coffee.
What a strange place. It feels so foreign to me, I keep looking the wrong way when I cross the road, expecting the cars to drive on the right hand side.
It feels like Australia, it feels like Asia and there are more reminders in an hour than you’d get in a Melbourne month that there were First Australians here long before my forebears sailed in.
It’s industrial and functional with more and more harbour-facing apartment blocks going up, looking weirdly south across the sea, out to the tour boats and the fishing boats and the vast grey sinister bulk of an American Navy vessel laden with helicopters.
It’s historic, with reminders everywhere of the Bombing of Darwin and World War II tunnels and Cyclone Tracy, the old courthouse carefully reconstructed and the modern Parliament House, beautiful as clean white bone.
The Whitefellahs only arrived in 1869 and by 1872 they had already built a telegraph line connecting the top with the bottom of the country – travelling down from Darwin and up from Port Augusta in South Australia, more than 3000 kilometres. An underground cable connected all this to Indonesia – Australia’s first modern communications channel to the rest of the world, the forebear, I suppose, of the tiny mobile in my pocket.
That evening we do something as Darwin as having take away on Mindil Beach – a barbeque on the deck looking out over the harbour with a couple of quiet ales. Sure feels a long way from Melbourne.
Reader Comments (2)
I feel the vastness of our continent reading your blog Clare. What you say of Darwin has its own manifestation in Cairns, Charleville, Perth and Tasmania. Peculiarities that almost belie our being one nation. Remarkable how geography contributes to the way we express our humanity and our being Australian.
This makes me want to head up there Clare. Darwin is the only capital city I haven't been to in our great land - sounds like a visit should be planned. Thanks so much for sharing your experiences, they sound heavenly.