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And then it came – from the north-west, with ferocious intensity, on Christmas Eve of 1974. It was not, in the end, the buildings smashed like tinder, nor the howling winds, the flying iron and glass, the devastation in all its baroque forms, that gave Tracy her weight in Darwin’s memory, not even the fifty deaths, so much as the line the cyclone drew across the past. How not to read the city today as a phased reaction to that disaster? The apartment towers rising like so many fortresses; the frantic search for grand, big-ticket economic ventures; the view of nature as something to be conquered, mastered; even the self-reliant politics of the conservatives who held power in the Territory for a whole post-Tracy generation. An eager class of small businessmen and public servants soon came north to build afresh. Old Darwin was effaced; ancient tropical characters were now surplus to requirements.
But another strain of new arrivals was also headed up the Stuart Highway and they, too, have left their stamp on the modern capital. By the early ’80s, with the romance of the Aboriginal cause rising even as dreams of revolution were failing on the Left, a generation of young southern radicals needed something to believe in. Many were tempted to the Territory, where they have come to form the nucleus of Darwin’s improbably energetic, distinctly anarchistic art scene: musicians, writers, dramatists and film-makers, their work forming a kind of connective tissue between Darwin and the remote Aboriginal communities strewn across the North.
It was 1985 when the cadaverously beautiful Chips Mackinolty, artist, designer and committed smoker, found his way to Darwin for an attempt at self-refashioning. “There’s a lotus-eating quality about the town,” he reflects. “I realised fairly quickly that I had found a place where I wasn’t tormented by the need constantly to move on, to seek out greener pastures. I had come across a city where I was happy to live out my life, where I would be happy to die.”
Mackinolty, with others, set up Green Ant Publishing in a notoriously run-down house in Nightcliff, where the pool parties would routinely attract a kind of alternative Darwin A-list. Then, in 2001, something unexpected happened: the Territory’s long-ineffectual ALP opposition won an election and found itself catapulted into office. It was – if on a very small stage – the Whitlam ascendancy, or 1917, or the coming of Tony Blair.
“I’d always been very sceptical, to put it gently, about institutions,” says Mackinolty. “I remember once I even produced a Guy Fawkes T-shirt, with a bomb on it, and the legend – ‘Keep warm this dry season – make trouble’. That was for the ceremonial opening of parliament – and look at me,” he goes on, dolefully. “It’s like some weird dream – I work there now!” And it’s true: the reformist Labor government’s unkempt spin doctors and house intellectuals can be seen wandering nonchalantly around the echoing halls of parliament, or chatting away on their mobiles in Darwin’s smartest watering holes.
There are, though, one or two pure souls who still hold themselves aloof from this witches’ feast of political and social redrafting. Deep in a bunker in Stuart Park, where no sun penetrates between the iron louvres, at a desk much like an aircraft flight counter, sits Andrew McMillan, former music writer, now literary conscience of the North. He first came to Darwin in 1978, camped on Lameroo Beach and realised it was his spiritual home. Once the charms of the Sydney music scene began to pall, he ventured up again, first to produce a record for local band the Swamp Jockeys, then following Midnight Oil on tour. There was a festival of Aboriginal rock. He came once more, for the weekend, caught anew the hidden flavour of the town, the harbour, the ooze of buried stories, the murk of lost time, and stayed for good.
“I was getting away from the scene down south,” McMillan says. “My interests had changed dramatically after my visits to the Top End, which had given me an insight into what was happening in Aboriginal Australia. I found Darwin people were relaxed, open to new ideas; I had the strong sense of individuals from all over the country travelling up here, surviving and thriving. There’s a fascinating past, full of characters; and the history’s all on the ground – you can go and find it like a prospector.”
McMillan has written three books already about the North; more are being incubated in his trademark gonzoid style. “Darwin’s a small country town with the infrastructure of a city. You can walk everywhere and you always bump into whoever you need to meet. Barriers are a lot easier to get through than in the southern cities, where everyone’s so full of their own importance. You can reinvent yourself. If I wasn’t in Darwin, I’d never have put together a band like the Fourth Estate. Where else would you be able to ask a bunch of journalists to ‘play’ miked-up typewriters on stage?” Of course there is the danger that all of these individual creative journeys and repeated cycles of destruction and renewal might end up estranging Darwin from its past, transforming it into a kind of indulgent fantasy town. Oddly, though, the sheer pace of change seems to be breeding a fresh enthusiasm for what’s gone – as if Darwin were at last giving its own back pages a second chance at life.
The most striking sign of this is the new prominence today of the city’s old indigenous world. The Aboriginal Larrakia people have at last become actors on the political stage. In one of the more surreal developments since the political earthquake of 2001, official “Larrakia hosts” in special uniforms have begun roaming the city centre, instructing tourists on Darwin’s indigenous history and encouraging homeless “itinerant” Aborigines from the Top End to behave with dignity during their stay in town.
Kelvin Costello, the young co-ordinator for the Larrakia Nation, has a mingled sense of Darwin’s trajectory. He laments the passing of the old Aboriginal icons, rough though they were, like the Dolphin Hotel, where he used to work at age seventeen. “Darwin’s getting to be like a rat race now, not how I remember it, all communal, with big card games always going on. There’s nothing that resembles what the town was like thirty years ago – there’s very little left except in our minds. We had a very extended family life; we’d go camping, fishing at Rapid Creek, East Point. People don’t do that any more, things aren’t so personal.
“But those were hard bloody times for us here: my mother raised four kids alone, and the government of those days was just waiting around for us to die off. It’s only now that we’re starting to be acknowledged as a people with a place here – and I want to make sure my kids, my brothers’ kids, all have the recognition on their own land that they deserve.”
How to bind this wild diversity together? Visionaries abound, though few are quite as upbeat as the dynamic Karen Brown, who, together with two of her sisters, runs the ultra-modern Karen Brown Gallery in the heart of Darwin, specialising in indigenous art. Much like the city she lives in, Brown has been riding the crest of change ever since she came back here, full of homesickness, after her university days, fell in with a crew of writers, and drove the poet Roland Robinson in her Toyota across the breadth of Arnhem Land.
“How small we are here!” she says. “We’re always thinking big new projects are going to be the answer, but we also need to keep and celebrate what we already have. I’m always looking out for Darwin, like everyone up here, asking how to make the city better, stronger. Darwin’s never going to be for the mass market, it’s a collection of individuals: freedom and permissiveness and creativity all rolled up in one. The one place in Australia where you have a chance of being what you really want.”
Cities, of course, resist the best plans of their residents. Their essence persists through time and generations, and breathes itself into the future. And so Darwin, for all its air of the provisional, the remade, remains just what it was when the first settlers appeared on its coastline: an unending elusiveness – a northern dream still waiting to take form.
Evening comes. Across the harbour, distant bushfires are still burning. Fishing boats bob on the tide. The sound of drunks and touch-football players, loud, but not too loud, rises from the Esplanade. And life, the lush life of the Australian tropics, flows carelessly on.
&
nbsp; The FCA
LIKE MANY A TROPICAL CITY, suffused with the atmospherics of García Márquez or Somerset Maugham, steamy Darwin is a place marked out by secretive, eccentric cabals and social institutions, some hovering only just this side of the fantastical. Chief among these, at least in its disseminated influence and its arbitrary, austerely enforced principles, is the Darwin Foreign Correspondents’ Association, a body far more exclusive than the humdrum Darwin Press Club, that haunt of local reporters.
Founded during a dark, liquid night some eight years back, the FCA, which boasts a fluctuating, if distinguished membership of a dozen or so, was the brainchild of its secretary for life, the wraith-like, anarchistic Chips Mackinolty, sometime stringer for the Fairfax Press and a current media svengali of the Labor government of the Northern Territory.
But wait up a moment, the attentive reader will object. There aren’t any foreign correspondents in Darwin. Ah, but the Territory, and above all the Top End, regards itself, at least psychologically, as a foreign land: hence all journalists who file their stories to the south become eligible for membership in the FCA.
More than eligible, in fact: the moment they arrive in town, they are press-ganged into service, and obliged to take on the onerous duties of president. They also receive the association’s vivid T-shirt, emblazoned with a setting sun, a pith helmet, a bottle of Gordon’s Gin and the official motto: “Austrem Servamus” – “We serve the South” (the Latinate version was kindly provided by John Nader, a former Territory Supreme Court judge, ties between the media and judiciary being, in these parts, unusually close).
Perhaps a touch disquietingly, incoming members also become subject to the association’s rules, which were crafted by Mackinolty and his fellow-founder, Jamie Gallacher, now, by an extraordinary coincidence, also a spin-doctor for the government.
“It all fell together,” reminisces Gallacher over a lengthy lunch in Mitchell Street. “There’s a hard-core group of senior journalists up here, and there has been, at least since the writer Douglas Lockwood’s day, who file their stories to the great newspapers of the south, and aren’t published locally – who see this as foreign terrain, to be explored with the techniques of the foreign correspondent. And the proud name of foreign correspondent requires the enforcement of certain standards.”
Most perplexing of these is the prohibition on any mention of crocodiles. If an FCA member files a story referring even once to these creatures by name, or by any other circumlocution (marine lizard, saurian, totemic animal), no matter what the circumstances, he or she incurs a penalty: the offender must buy six bottles of red wine for the next association gathering. So strictly is this principle applied that even the brief mention of its existence in a piece of reportage for book publication falls under the ban. I pleaded with Mackinolty and Gallacher for an advance exemption, as the lunchtime shots of Tia Maria came and went, but they are inflexible men. Not for nothing is the government they run known as the “New Taliban”. Not for nothing are their parliamentary offices known, and feared, as “Tora Bora”.
But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, the crocodiles (another six bottles?). This odd precept derives from Mackinolty’s reporting days, when he extracted a written agreement from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age that he would not be required to write saurian stories.
The idea has lingered, and several of Australia’s most distinguished journalists have found themselves caught in the association’s trap. The Bulletin’s cunning northern correspondent, Paul Toohey, has tried to file a piece referring to “suspected alligators”. The 7.30 Report’s northern star, Murray McLaughlin, seeks to rely on visual images to do his descriptive work. Dodges and circumlocutions are the order of the day, and breed an oddly glancing, coded, allusive form of journalism whenever croc fatalities darken the tourist trail.
FCA membership can have its benefits, though. You become eligible to receive the pith helmet given yearly for best reporting under enemy fire (the cheque is for $5.70, equivalent to 5,000 rials, the sum the Khmer Rouge placed on the head of former Territory journalist David Nason long ago). The award’s most meritorious winner, without doubt, was its first, the ABC’s Jeremy Thompson, honoured for an interview in the course of which a politician tried to strangle him on camera with a microphone cord.
*
“People do get taken aback by some of the association’s grace-notes,” concedes Mackinolty, eyes narrowing. “But there was a need, in Darwin, for a rococo organisation of this kind: a platform for discussion independent of the local media.”
Indeed, the FCA has a pivotal role in the Territory’s faintly raffish intellectual world. For in a place of such a scale, so lashed into shape by climate and the shared struggle to endure, the membranes between the media, the artistic and the political realms dissolve away; the informal becomes the formal, the unserious the serious. Ideas, notions, intuitions circulate, shift, are passed on in an endless, unstructured conversation. Of such exchanges as these, the Darwin FCA is the emblem and the home.
And, as with many another tropical enclave, the lines dividing this club from others are often blurred. A night with the FCA can lead directly to the Fourth Estate, for instance. No, not the fourth estate, of which the association’s luminaries are already, by definition, members, but the Fourth Estate, the typewriter-playing garage band kept in tune by the Top End’s chief Gonzo journalist, Andrew McMillan.
Reader, you don’t believe any of this can be true? Well then: you obviously haven’t had the pleasure of hearing the Fourth Estate’s debut CD, with its distinctive, thumping, click-clack sound, and its much-loved standout track, the wheezily intoned “Deadline Blues”.
Goldsworthy
THERE WAS A TOWN NAMED GOLDSWORTHY. It lay in the deep-red ranges of the North Pilbara, near where the fitful watercourses of the De Grey and Coongan rivers meet. Behind these mountains, the long straight dune-corridors of the Great Sandy Desert begin: snake country, full of bloodwood trees and combustible lemon-yellow spinifex. But where the peaks reach highest, almost within view of the Indian Ocean’s shoreline, unusual geological markers can be seen. Even the most cursory of explorers, pushing through this country long ago, picked up the telltale signs: many of the outcrops they rode past were jet black, and looked like fused magma, and gave off a metallic sound when struck by horses’ hooves. As soon as mineral exploration began in earnest in the far north-west, it became plain that Mount Golds worthy held the world’s richest deposits of ferrous ore: the veins ran deep, and they graded as high as 68 per cent. This decided the landscape’s fate. In the 1960s, the Pilbara was opened up to mining; Goldsworthy was the first large-scale project. For two decades, 4,000 men and women lived there, in a realm of cyclones, flash floods and blazing summer skies – and many of them, in their imaginings, seem resident there still.
But Goldsworthy no longer exists. It is not a ghost town, or a ruin, or even a post-industrial wasteland. It is an ex-place. Great efforts have been devoted to removing all signs of the past from this corner of the Pilbara. Indeed, a mere handful of out-of-date maps still mark the spot where the town stood, and only old-timers can sense the curve in the iron-ore railroad as it passes Goldsworthy on the way out to the mining centre at Shay Gap. So thorough has this act of “disappearing” the town been that across the Pilbara, a region where the working population churns at high speed, the majority of today’s residents are quite unaware that a large, vivid township once broke the line of the spinifex on the flood-plain of the De Grey.
*
When I began travelling through this country, almost a decade ago, I quickly found that it answered to some need in me: its emptiness, its antiquity, its air of tranquil waiting. Its colours, too – the red rock platforms, the mauve horizons and the sky that radiated chill hostility inside its heat. The Pilbara was precious to me, and because of this it became important to me to seem to know it. Often, as I drove through its back-blocks, or fell into conversations in roadhouses or survey camps, the peo
ple I met would lean forward. “Goldsworthy,” they would ask, with an edge in their voice: “Did you ever go there?” And I would search my memory, and find next to nothing: had I seen a sign once, on the highway, near the Pardoo turn-off: “Goldsworthy access – loose sand and corrugations” – or did I half-remember glimpsing a tattered T-shirt on some road-train driver’s chest, commemorating a Goldsworthy Mining Company open day?
“Of course,” I would answer then, in the vaguest terms, “I know that country,” or “Close by, yes, to Shay Gap,” or even, a touch more truthfully, “I’ve heard about it – the name comes up every now and then.”
So it was with a slight sense of relief, as much as with anticipation, that I drove out one dry season morning, together with my friend Kelvin McCann, a veteran of Goldsworthy, on a pilgrimage of sorts – and even before we passed the Hedland truckstop, now transformed into a large BP supermarket, his reminiscences began. He had walked that flat landscape between the port and the salt-ponds, many years ago, with Don Mcleod, the organiser of the first indigenous strikes in the Pilbara. Mcleod had even shown him all the waterholes where the Aboriginal people used to hide from the police.
“Those places are still out there,” said Kelvin. “It all still seems very raw to me, that past, not like anything one can forget. The more you leave it alone, the more consolidated and stable it becomes.” He told me how he would quarter the landscape, in those first years he spent in the North, when he was determined to find every remote waterhole and hideaway – and he would take this obsession with hidden history and lost places to the most extreme of lengths. Once, he even pushed his old Land Rover through into Windjana Gorge, where the outlaw Jandamarra had made his last stand, and found the abandoned hide-out cave. “I went in, and all the old stuff was still there. I had read all about his exploits in the books of Ion Idriess when I was a boy, I knew the whole story – and there on the cave floor were the 44.40 shells bound up with kangaroo hide, and the blood and wreckage from that time. Of course, it’s all been prettified up, now that it’s a national park – you wouldn’t have a clue to what was once there. That’s what people love to do with memories: tidy them into an attractive state.”
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