by Gil McNeil
About the only other thing I knew about Darwin was that it had been hit by a humungous cyclone – Cyclone Tracy – on Christmas Eve in 1974. Chris Baker describes it as ‘one of the greatest natural disasters in Australian history’, and reports that it ‘left only about 500 of the city’s then 8000 homes habitable. Today Darwin is considered a relaxed tropical city with a relatively young population numbering above 70,000.’
I was going to have less than twenty-four hours here, and planned to hit the tarmac running.
Although my time in Darwin would be brief, and an ideal test of Finlay Watchorn’s words of wisdom, I realised in the taxi driving into the city that I was under absolutely no pressure. As we drove past Fannie Bay Gaol and along palm-tree-lined freeways under the domed blue sky, I realised I had no meetings to go to, no journalistic deadlines to meet for a few days, no appointments with friends, or family commitments.
‘Would you mind just driving around the town a bit?’ I asked the driver, deciding to take full advantage of the situation. ‘I’ve never been here before and wouldn’t mind getting my bearings.’ The taxi looked like it had just rolled off the Mercedes Benz production line. It had that new-car smell with matching pride of ownership. The friendly young Chinese driver, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and heavy gold watch, explained that he did mostly corporate work for the big Asian companies who took advantage of Darwin’s tax breaks on raw materials.
I was enjoying the thrill of excitement that comes with new road signs pointing to exotic-sounding places – Humpty Doo, Rum Jungle, Darwin Crocodile Farm, Melacca Swamp – which might, given the size of the Northern Territory, be a thousand miles away or just around the corner. The Northern Territory occupies over one-sixth of Australia’s great landmass, yet has less than 150,000 people, half of whom live in Darwin. Mind-boggling!
Charlie, as he introduced himself, pointed out the Diamond Beach Casino and hinted that he had more than a passing familiarity with its games of crap, blackjack and two-up. I’d expected a lot of new buildings and standardised housing after the ravages of Cyclone Tracy. What I hadn’t expected was the lush greenery, which didn’t stop at the city’s outskirts but accompanied us in. Sometimes it expanded into parks, or squeezed itself along hibiscus-dripping nature strips. Sometimes it rolled towards the sea, then doubled back into town. The wet season must be pretty wet, I thought, for the dry season to be so green. And framing this tropical greenness was the white of concrete buildings that stood squatly to attention.
‘We call these buildings “six-packs”,’ Charlie told me. ‘They’re all post-cyclone, of course. Built very quickly. There’s an interesting nature walk just down there. It takes you to a place called Doctor’s Gully where you can hand-feed fish – thousands of them, and big buggers too. Very colourful. It was a local doctor who started it in his retirement and it’s become quite an attraction. You’ve got to be there at high tide though.’
‘Tell me,’ I asked, head still full of road signs. ‘How does a place come to get called Humpty Doo?’
‘You’re not the first passenger to ask that, sir,’ Charlie replied politely. ‘There’s always been a big Chinese community around Humpty Doo since early attempts at growing rice there. My great-great-grandparents were some of the first migrants there. They came north by coach and camel train after the Ballarat gold rush ended. On my mother’s side of the family, you understand. As for the name, local lore says it was an early settler who used to travel into Darwin from there, and when asked how things were, his reply was, “Everything’s Humpty Doo.” And the name stuck.’
‘Just down the road from Hunky Dory,’ I added cheekily.
‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘Nothing, just a thought from afar . . .’
We cruised past the Esplanade and he pointed out my hotel, which we would return to later. A quick circuit of Smith Street, Bennett, McMinn and Daly gave me the coordinates of the city grid, and I noted where the post office, newsagent’s and Coles supermarket were situated. I’d visit them all later in the afternoon to procure refreshments and stamps.
Each end of the city leads down to either a wharf or a marina and we visited them both. We parked at the Stokes Hill Wharf and I got out to look at some of the shops and restaurants. They were all pretty much international bland, themed to look like a pale Rorschach blot of an original somewhere else on the planet. Similarly, the main drag up in the city had its Shennagins Irish Pub and its Rorke’s Drift video bar. But each, no matter how themed, was pierced with local content that placed you precisely at the Top End, as this part of the continent is known. In a restaurant called Schnitzel Magic on the wharf, which I feared would be a culinary recreation of Old Vienna, I read on the chalkboard the specials of the day:
Barramundi
Crocodile
Camel
Squid
Buffalo
Kangaroo
(All with Chips and Salad)
The bakery next door, which could have been modelled on a Hansel and Gretel Gingerbread House, was offering a range of ‘Pirate’s Pies’ with similarly exotic fillings for ‘Meat Lovers’, listed below a chalk-drawn skull and crossbones.
From there we drove to the other side of the city, to Cullen Bay, which looked alarmingly like Sullivan’s Cove in Hobart, Tasmania, which from here was several thousand kilometres towards the South Pole. Yachts bobbed in the marina, upmarket restaurants jostled against wine bars, and to my delight at the furthest arm-stretch of the bay we could just glimpse a lighthouse.
‘That’s Emery Point,’ Charlie told me. ‘But it’s on an army reserve and we can’t get access.’ Bugger!
I checked up on it later, and it is – like many lights in the Top End – an open criss-cross construction of white girders with a beacon on the top. However, my main focus on this trip was to get to Cape Leveque lighthouse. But that was still three days and a couple of thousand kilometres away.
Up in my hotel room, after Charlie had finally dropped me off, I got out my maps and charts and had a proper squiz at the territory – the Northern Territory to be precise. About forty kilometres off the coast of Darwin are two islands – Bathurst and Melville – home of the Tiwi people. They are separated by a narrow strait, known as the Apsley Strait, which was missed by the early Dutch explorers in 1644. They thought it was a single island. For thousands of years the Tiwi people lived here, united by a common language and culture, unlike the Aborigines of mainland Australia. Cape Fourcroy sat at the far west of Bathurst Island, while out to the east were lights on Cape Don, Cape Crocker and New Year Island.
Beyond that is a mini-necklace of lighthouses that stretches many hundreds of kilometres from the Timor Sea, through the Arafura Sea and down into the Gulf of Carpenteria, where around Groote Eyelande there is a string of smaller lights and beacons. Plenty to come back to later, I assured Finlay Watchorn, who as ever was sitting on my left shoulder, egging me on. Another bit of his wisdom that I always remembered was that you should never try and exhaust a new destination on your first visit. ‘Always keep a few things to do on your second visit, laddie. Did I ever tell you about my second trip to Morocco?’
I enjoyed my eighteen hours in Darwin. I spent most of my one evening there just strolling round the centre, looking at things, photographing signage, making notes and having the occasional cool beer after the fierce heat of the day. In one Wild West-style watering hole I met a crazy American called Drizzle who was writing a PhD on ‘storm-chasers’, always arriving a safe distance after the event. He bore an uncanny resemblance to James Joyce, with a black eye patch and a pair of heavy spectacles.
Elsewhere, I rather liked the way many inner-city hotels advertised ‘Chilled Swimming Pool’ as a selling point, and agreed with Finlay that had I stayed there a month I’d never have remembered it. The surprise factor would have vanished, along with my fascination for local menus and exotic street signs.
Most of the wildness in this ‘wild frontier town’ seemed to be coming from touris
ts who’d spent too long in the sun and then too long in the saloon, rather than the locals, who I found were all very friendly, laid-back and helpful.
Just before night fell – and it fell with tropical suddenness – I perused an open-fronted hut on the Esplanade, which told the story of Darwin’s wartime bombing by the Japanese. ‘Almost two hours after the first air raid, 54 land-based bombers attacked the Darwin RAAF Station. A total of 243 people died in the raids, eight ships sunk, many buildings were damaged, communications were cut and the township was shattered.’
These text displays with their sepia photographs hung on a green lattice grid through which I caught the fading sun on the dark-turning sea. I remembered once during a similarly brief sojourn in Hawaii on my way back to a Scottish Hogmanay, I’d gone out on a sailing ship with a boatload of mostly Japanese tourists to view Pearl Harbor. The tourism of war, the need for memorials, seemed to be as strong a force as cultural tourism, with its need for the sublime moment amidst the everyday. Port Arthur, Auschwitz, Culloden, Waterloo, Gallipoli . . . or would you rather go to Donald Judd’s sculpture ranch at Marfa in Texas? I would. Perhaps Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetic Garden Temple, Little Sparta, on the Scottish moors south of Glasgow and Edinburgh, best combines the main elements of the sublime: a heightened consciousness of joy with the ever-present threat of terror.
My last two hours in Darwin were, in many ways, the best. I was travelling light, so on my way to the airport and my flight across the Top End to Broome, I took one taxi to the museum and art gallery, and would call another one later to complete the journey and catch my plane.
The great thing is that it was much more than an art gallery. First of all, it was set in lush botanic gardens. Banners outside advertised a Darwin contemporary art triennial, and a huge floating astronaut flagged a space exploration exhibit.
Time was short, so I didn’t linger too long in the graphic Cyclone Tracy display, other than to marvel at the powers of nature on a bad day. Early Aboriginal paintings in the European watercolour tradition by several members of the same family were admirable but made me very happy that collectively the Aboriginal communities had followed the dotted path of its pioneers, Geoffrey Barden and Clifford Possum.
No, the big surprise for me was the huge extension at the back of the museum – think aircraft-hangar dimensions – which housed a comprehensive maritime museum. And it was a maritime museum that was not only flavoured by the Top End and its surrounding islands, it was entirely that.
To get into the extension, I had to pass a rather ferocious gatekeeper called Sweetheart, who ends up featuring in most travellers’ accounts of Darwin. Sweetheart is an absolutely huge crocodile. If you are a two-car family and one of them is a four-wheel drive and the other a Volkswagen, imagine them parked bumper to bumper, and that is about the size of Sweetheart. I marvelled at the size of his teeth, and had been told his testicles were equally impressive. However, I wasn’t convinced he was dead and safely stuffed – I knew these prehistoric beasts could be very patient – so there was no way I was going to have a squint at his nether regions. Before arriving here, I’d wondered whether the Northern Territory would downplay its crocs in case it scared away tourists, but having been to Far North Queensland – ‘Beautiful One Day, Perfect the Next’ as its tourism pitch goes – I was pretty sure they wouldn’t. Around Darwin, as in Cairns, crocodiles featured on menus, in museums and as feeding events at special farms. Bizarrely, while Australia has no alligators, the Northern Territory has three rivers running through Kakadu reserve: West Alligator River, South Alligator River and East Alligator River. It turns out the Pom who named them was trained in surveying and not zoology. He’d probably have made a pretty meagre snack anyway. Sweetheart’s claim to fame is that he did not attack people, but went ballistic when he heard the sound of motorboats. A lot of weekend sailors ended up very wet, but only their machinery was chewed to destruction. I edged past the enormous beast, alert for subdued breathing, and into the maritime wing.
The place was full of boats of all sizes, their sails erect as if caught full breeze. The huge hangar – intersected with mezzanine walkways – was filled with light. The appealing aspect about the exhibits was that most of them had not been restored to their former glory but had been left sun-bleached and weathered. They all belonged to the general family of ‘sailing craft’ but they were all markedly different from each other. It reminded me of when I was a very young child and my father would show me the stacks upon stacks of boxes of insects in his study, towering high above the heavy black microscope and the formaldehyde specimen jars. Here was a box full of weevils, yet like these boats, they were all so different from each other, neatly pinned to tiny white squares of card like new shirts in a tailor’s shop. Here was a box of moths, and another of butterflies, one as grey as porridge, the other rainbow-hued and glistening like an oil slick in the sun.
I could tell that one boat, its hull now faded, had once been painted like a fairground carousel with orchids and leaf fronds repeating and swirling round its hull and stern. But you had to look closely to discern the palimpsest that was the sun-cracked wooden hull, which could only be read like a skull beneath the skin.
Then there were the sails! The sails were all as different in colour, shape and texture as a walk round the Pompidou Centre’s twentieth-century collection. Some were bold, like a Frank Stella, with a stripe of red on yellow. Others had a faded chequerboard effect in blues and greys with stripes of vermilion pink, like those Chinese bags you see at laundromats the world over, or at refugee checkpoints, stuffed with a lifetime’s possessions. Probably made of the same material, I guessed.
Next to a glorious vessel that looked like a cross between a Viking longship and a candy-covered birthday cake, I read a text headed ‘Bajau Lipa Lipa’. It began: ‘The Bajau, or “sea gypsies” as they are often called, are a marvellous group of maritime people who have spread through much of Southeast Asia. Traditionally they lead a semi-nomadic life on the sea with each family using a house boat or Lipa Lipa as its home.’
A little further on, something low and sleek caught my eye. It had the sort of design lines that made you think ‘shark’ or ‘torpedo’, but it was definitely a boat. In fact, it was a Vietnamese refugee boat with the rather pretty name of Thinh Voong, which the label told me meant ‘prosperity’.
‘It arrived in Darwin in June 1978 with 9 people on board,’ I read, fascinated that there was a real human story attached to the craft in front of me and it hadn’t just been ‘bought in’ as an example, or specimen. ‘Following the end of the American-Vietnam war, thousands of refugees fled their homeland in fishing boats and other small vessels.’
But astonishment was to build on astonishment as I came next upon a huge dugout canoe from Tanimbar Island in Indonesia. At the height of the cyclone season it had drifted across the Arafura Sea while attempting to make the very short trip across the Ergon Straits from one little island to an even smaller one – and I thought of Arran to Pladda thirty years ago. Their ‘drift’, as such a journey is called, took the four men, two women and four children 333km (180 miles) towards the Top End of Australia, where they were picked up just off the Cape Don lighthouse and taken to Darwin. During the long voyage they had survived on a little corn, some dried fish and rainwater. ‘It is unusual to find such a large, well-made canoe with no “strakes” (planks) to increase its freeboard and sea-keeping ability.’
But it was what came next that for me was like finding a nugget of gold just lying at my feet. I should tell you that there are two artists – one Australian, one Scottish – whose lives have become fascinating for me because of their extraordinary adventurous quality and their love of islands and adventures. One is John Peter Russell, the Australian Impressionist, who befriended Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec, married Rodin’s model, went to live in a huge house on the Belle Isle off the Brittany coast, and painted there with both Monet and, later, Matisse.
In Hilary Spurling’s gripping bio
graphy The Unknown Matisse, the one-time literary editor of the Spectator writes: ‘Matisse himself said that it was Russell who introduced him to the Impressionists’ theories of light and colour, in particular to the innovations of Claude Monet, setting technical exercises to help him assimilate them in practice.’ Shortly before Rodin died, in his last letter to Russell he said, ‘Your works will live, I am certain. One day you will be placed on the same level with our friends Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh.’
By contrast to the born-into-wealth Russell, the Scottish artist Ian Fairweather turned his back on money, instead courting poverty and the freedom it gave him. Born near Crieff in Scotland, he was educated by aunts in London, attended the Slade and ended up travelling widely in China, studying calligraphy, and ending his days on Bribie Island off the Queensland coast of Australia. Most of his paintings, which were like an independent flourishing of Abstract Expressionism – particularly pre-drip-and-dribble Jackson Pollock – were made on cardboard,fn1 hence they haven’t travelled and he is barely known at all outside Australia. He should be in every twentieth-century art book, in my opinion. I’d heard vague stories that he’d made a dangerous raft journey at one point in his life, and this is the point at which I stumbled on my nugget of gold. On the wall-text that described the journey of the six-metre dugout canoe that sat before me, I read the concluding paragraph. ‘Since 1950 only two small drift craft have gone in the opposite direction. One was that of artist Ian Fairweather, who launched his raft from the Fannie Bay foreshore near to where the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory stands today.’ Perhaps, I thought, one day I will write a book about artists who lived on islands. And Fairweather and Russell will be top of my list.