Sleepy, tiny, remote Darwin
The first thing that struck me in Darwin was the high proportion of Aborigines. The second was how small and empty this state capital is (its population is comparable with that of Weston-Super-Mare in England or Versailles in France). The third was that there is something a bit rootless and very remote about Darwin, sitting as it is on the end of a peninsula, closer to Djakarta than to any other big town in Australia.
That could be because the town we see today, only granted city status 59 years ago, has nothing of the Palmerston (as it was first named) founded in 1869. Renamed Darwin in 1911, the town was destroyed by a Japanese bombing campaign which started on 19 February 1942 and continued until November 1943. The rebuilt city was then 80% destroyed in the early hours of Christmas Day 1974 by Cyclone Tracy. So almost all the buildings we see now were built less than 40 years ago. And perhaps because these buildings have been constructed to be cyclone resistant, the tallest, the residential Evolution on Gardiner, stands just 33-storeys (99m) high. Only 13 other buildings are more than 10-storeys tall, all concentrated in the tiny Central Business District. The rest of the town hides under large tropical plants, most of which are familiar to us northern Europeans as table-top house plants!
The weather is tropical too. The last days of February, steamy: 35ºC heat and 75% humidity. It's still the wet season in Darwin: damp not only with rain but also with humans dripping sweat!
The foreignness of Darwin might also lie in the frequency with which one hears an unfamiliar language, that of the original owners of the area, the Larrakia (saltwater) people. They constitute 9% of the population of 84,468 in Darwin, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, compared to an average 2.8% for Aborigines in the rest of the country. It is thus the city with the highest proportion of Aborigines in this continent-country. We didn't know any of this when we arrived so were taken aback when we heard loud voices, one or two slurred by alcohol*, calling out to each other in an unfamiliar tongue as we walked through a park looking for the Darwin Waterfront. We only learned later that many of these people sleep in the parks.
And then sitting in a café one morning, just people watching, I was struck by how they dress and move. The women's long, flowing skirts, very loose tops and bare or flip-flopped feet, combined with their slow, languorous movements seemed to me much more suited to the suffocating heat and humidity than the jeans, leggings, tight dresses, booties (really?) worn by their fast-paced, pale-skinned counterparts. But then the latter spend their days in air-conditioned homes, offices and shops whilst the former are outdoors.
The Aboriginal heritage of the area also shows in the city's urban furniture: the characteristic pointillist style has been re-interpreted in stainless steel to decorate the bottom of the lampposts in Smith Street, the only pedestrian street (or mall as they're known in Australia) and in decorative panels to hide various other bits and pieces of urban furniture.
Darwin, described on its official website as “laid-back” (so laid-back I feel, that it's just asleep!!) is growing. That could be in part because if you're a foreigner it's easier to get a work permit to labour in Darwin than anywhere else in Australia, or so the young French cook of a restaurant in town told me. He seemed OK with that, but I think I would have to be paid a lot of money to come and live here! I'm glad I've seen it but a couple of days sufficed to see enough that I won't need to come again... unless to buy Aboriginal art.
I've not seen such a choice of this art at such reasonable prices anywhere else. There is one particular gallery in the Smith Street mall which had a very wide range of works of art and we were sorely tempted but wondered how we would get the work home without spoiling it. So we didn't buy anything and now I regret it.
We've been in Australia now for nearly a month and have not yet been bitten or attacked by mosquitoes, crocodiles, spiders, dingos or Tasmanian devils. But Christophe was swooped by a bird yesterday, seconds after I'd been reading on a panel at the Darwin Waterfront about “how to avoid being swooped” (wear a hat and sunglasses and if you're a cyclist cover your cycle helmet with small antennae. I'm afraid I just laughed myself silly...
* The Northern Territory (or Top End) has the highest per-capita rate of alcohol consumption in Australia, one of the highest in the world, and the highest rate of hospitalisations due to alcohol misuse. The Territory also has the nation’s highest rates of alcohol-related crime, violence and death, according to a recent report by former NT supreme court chief justice Trevor Riley.
