CHAPTER 18
A New Darwin Emerges
Old Darwin Town died with its destruction during the Second World War. The city that emerged from the turmoil was a far cry from that of the past, and those who came there to live after 1945 would never know it in the full chaotic tropical flamboyance of the small frontier town it had been.
For years people complained about the Territory and its capital. Darwin the damned, some called it. A sheet of newspaper was all that separated it from hell, they caustically declared; it would be profitable to export its mountains of discarded liquor bottles. As late as 1942, Professor C.J. Hart of Toronto, in an open article, told the world that our Territory was not worth owning, describing it as: ‘A land of vast empty spaces marked on the map with rivers that contain no water and towns that contain no people . . . one of the most hopeless in the world to live in, and one of the most difficult to get away from.’
But we liked the old place; had been born impervious to its discomforts. You nodded agreement to their complaints, looked sternly upon your outrageously rambunctious little town, and pretended to be ashamed of it.
Out of Chinatown came Darwin’s gossip, information on business developments, mining news, cattle movements, pearl and peanut prices—scandal, too. One heard, ‘It must be true, got it straight from Cavanagh Street.’
A town without a Chinese community must surely be dull. Chinese New Year was an exciting festival that we all looked forward to: the fantastic dragon with a hundred legs—the longest in Australia, we were told; cymbals clashing; crackers to ward off evil thrown under your feet; food in such abundance to warm every child’s heart.
Somewhat more intimidating to me were the small dark shops of old Chinatown, where idols sat with smiles on their painted faces, the pale smoke of incense lazily drifted, and enigmatic, unsmiling old men in high-necked frogged jackets, cloth shoes and small black caps smoked their water pipes, while trousered women gave a gold-toothed smile behind the abacus on the counter and sold you liquorice plums, salted ginger or a pennyworth of roasted melon seeds, all taken from big glass jars on dusty shelves and doled out into tiny white packets. And perhaps if a man were known, a little opium could change hands too.
The mother goddess Kwan Yin, giver of fine sons, was obviously appreciative of the offerings on her shrine, for the Chinese had large families—a Chinese man could have several wives—and children overflowed the cramped, small houses of old Chinatown.
In their shops Chinese tailors padded about in bare feet and could make a perfect linen suit for a few shillings. My mother had a favourite tailor who could turn out a garment in a day or two. When working on the front of a jacket, his finger would hop-skippity down the button line: ‘What you want, Missus? You want button, button, button, or you want button, button nothing, button, button nothing?’ And in no time it was finished, buttoned to request and perfect.
So Chinatown remained until its destruction during the war. From those early Chinese who’d come as coolies to scratch a living from gold, tin and hard manual labour on railway construction, ever industrious, minding their own business, planting their vegetable gardens, bamboo and mango trees by springs and waterways, came respected citizens, business and professional men. Harry Chan, a handsome Darwin-born accountant, was the first elected president of the Northern Territory Legislative Council in 1965. Alec Fong Lim, he of the effervescent personality and generous spirit, was my good friend for many years before his early death; Alec was one of Darwin’s greatest lord mayors.
Now all that remains of the original fine gardens are enormous mango trees and clumps of soaring bamboo overtaken by bush. The outskirts of old mining towns are still pitted with the shafts of Chinese diggings.
What an establishment was Zero in the Tropics, on the corner of Cavanagh Street. What child of the 1930s could forget it? Real ice-cream for the first time, served in a glass dish with a thin dry wafer and a tiny glass of ice water, considered an essential accompaniment. Luxury beyond belief for unworldly bush children in whose homes a refrigerator hadn’t yet made an appearance.
For Territory kids, almost always barefoot, it was well worth putting your shoes on to be taken to the Zero, where you sat with not a word of complaint that your shoes or anything else were uncomfortable. With the punkah’s gentle breeze lifting the sweat-damp hair on your neck, you slowly ate that gleaming white ice-cream. You wondered: Could life hold anything better?
After all these years, I can still describe the patterns on the stemmed glass dish. Visits to the Zero were treats extraordinarily special to a bush kid in the early 1930s, a time of sparse luxuries in Darwin.
Then there was the ‘Squash Shop’ run by Javanese. Long thick slabs of ice were shaved into curls with a plane, and added to big containers of freshly squeezed lemons and limes. I wish they were still there, and give them a wistful thought on hot days while trudging the streets of Darwin.
The enormous banyan tree on the corner of Smith Street, with its long, rubbery, snake-like roots descending from above to burrow in the surrounding earth, covered a corner block close to the Star Pictures cinema. The local kids saved their sixpences and we’d view the open-air movies from its comfortable branches. Later, down it came, and a concrete bank building went up in its place—a building that still bears the pockmarks of Japanese machine-gun bullets.
In 1890 the Victoria Hotel had been built in Smith Street by Chinese labourers from the pale-hued stone of the sea cliffs; wooden pegs were hammered into the cliff face and swelled when submerged by high tide, forcing the soft rock to split into blocks.
From 1926 and into the 1930s, Mrs Christina Gordon and her two sons, Cookie and Wattie, owned and operated the Vic. As a young woman, Christina had travelled by buggy and buckboard through harsh country of the north-west, hundreds of miles over spinifex and desert with her husband and two small sons, to join in the gold rush of the waterless, miserable country of the Tanami desert.
Her husband, Walter, and his brother Hugh Gordon were brothers-in-law to Nat Buchanan, the explorer and cattleman who first took up and named Wave Hill Station. Walter and Hugh were inseparable and always travelled together, along with Christina who, besides May Brown and a few others, was the only white woman to have lived rough in the man’s world of the desert gold-diggings.
At ten years old I was in awe of Mrs Gordon. She favoured long, high-necked Edwardian-style dresses with a cameo at the throat, and spent her days in her office at the foot of the polished wooden staircase. She was an imposing sight, sitting stiffly behind her window grille.
Guests received superior service at the old Vic. Ornately decorated china chamber pots could be found in a cupboard by each bed, and shoes were placed outside one’s door at night, shined to perfection and awaiting their owners. Tea was delivered to one’s bedside each morning—no preparing your own tea in those hotels. Mrs Gordon’s dining room was starched and gleaming under the punkah fan, with its scalloped edging that gave it a lift from the ordinary. The waitresses wore black with little white aprons and small frontal caps like starched tiaras.
The Vic still stands, but how many know of its past glory?
Monsoons did more than make you wet. As Ernestine Hill wrote in 1930, ‘To come into Darwin in the Wet Season is to tip-toe across the bounds of possibility into an opium dream.’
The oppressive heat and cloying humidity brought with them that scourge of the tropics, prickly-heat skin rash, all of which ensured sleepless nights on sweat-soaked sheets, enshrouded with netting to barricade oneself from mosquitoes, sand flies and myriad other creatures—small or large, with wings or crawling legs. Malaria and dengue fever were common ailments, and every home medicine cupboard contained quinine tablets.
For some, problems of depression and loneliness surfaced in those trying conditions. That abandoned character in the tropical setting of a Somerset Maugham novel—gin-soaked, unshaven, in dirty tropical whites, crashing his fist in despair on the table and mumbling, ‘The rain, the rai
n, my God, the rain!’—has been well known to Darwin, although that romantic version is gone now. These days he hangs out in the parks, in thongs and grubby shorts. The desperation for departure isn’t so urgent when one can hop on a bus or take a flight out, whatever the weather: impossible back then in the wet, when berth on the monthly boat was the only passage out—if finances permitted, of course.
Monsoon was the time of year for suicide, oft-conducted with such flamboyance that these deaths are still yarned about. A graceful swallow dive from the high water tank behind the Victoria Hotel was a popular method, often during the busiest hour. It gave drinkers at the bar pause for a moment or two, but with no undue interest.
In the early 1920s a Japanese consul decided, for reasons unknown, to depart a cruel world. No half-measures here—he cut his throat from one ear to the other, and his head fell back over his wooden pillow. He lay behind wide glass windows, a ghastly sight for all who passed by. Unfortunately for my father, he was voted among troopers as having the strongest stomach for such things, so it fell to him to approach the poor consul’s body with bag, needle and twine, with a view to temporary reconstruction before it was removed.
Perhaps one of the most memorable departures was devised by a gentleman who had a flair for the unusual. He wandered through the crowded bar-room with a cigar in his mouth, and in a jovial manner shook a hand here, had a friendly word to another, good will all around. Then, to disinterested drinkers, he said a theatrical ‘Goodbye to you all!’ and lit his cigar.
My father, who was there, said it fizzed a little. Then, with a loud retort, the man’s head and cigar exploded together, above and beyond.
Exit Territory style.
A popular tree grown around Darwin was the cinchona; quinine was made from its bark. We also ate its berries, although who knows why, as they were bitter and acidic—perhaps we had a vitamin need in that direction. Tamarinds also put the teeth on edge, as any Territory kid will tell, but we devoured them with relish.
Darwin has a unique botanical gardens with giant trees seen nowhere else in Australia—specimens brought from Asia the century before, with unusual names. We would picnic under a huge ‘Devil’s Tooth’ tree, disregarding the large white painted sign at the entrance saying, ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT’. Sadly Cyclone Tracy destroyed many of these wonderful trees in 1974.
In those pre-war days the gardens were maintained by prisoners from Fannie Bay Gaol. Armed guards strolled among them, rifles in hand. The gaol had been built in 1884 at a cost of £5600, and remained in use with its great sea views for years. This was quite sad really, for the inmates, incarcerated behind high iron walls, never got a chance to enjoy the view.
The gaolers of Fannie Bay had a very laissez-faire attitude to prisoners. They turned a blind eye on certain individuals who chose to spend their evenings outside in more conventional company than that of their cellmates. There were conditions, however: they must return in time for morning roll call.
Jack Buscall was one of the favoured ones. One morning, returning over the gaol’s high iron wall, he fell and injured his back, never to walk again. With his sister to attend him, Mr Buscall opened a store close to the Convent School, where he sold sweets and curios from his bed behind the shop counter. It was said he used a wheelchair, and perhaps on occasion he did, but we kids never saw him other than dressed in a white singlet, sitting up in his bed, complete with white sheets and pillows, as he attended to his customers.
He kept a menagerie of animals—kangaroos, emus, other bush creatures—in a high-fenced yard, and right at the entrance to his little shop were overhanging cages of reptiles. To enter, one had to pass beneath a cage of light wire netting, sagging alarmingly with the weight of a gigantic Boa constrictor, whose great head, with bright beady eyes, was never shyly buried within its masses of piled coils, but always aggressively stiff and alert, ever watchful.
Mr Buscall sold many delectable sweets, but he was sole purveyor of a small hard lolly on a short stick, called a lamp-post, which cost a ha’penny each. If a lamp-post hadn’t been such a gnawing necessity, I would never have ventured beneath that enormous snake with its steady, glittering eyes.
CHAPTER 19
War is Declared
In 1939, on the eve of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Beagle sailing into Darwin Harbour, war was declared in Europe. Not long after this, my mother and I, like so many others, prepared to go to Queensland.
The only comfort I took from leaving my beloved old dog, who was the same age as me, was that Mrs George Stevens had agreed to adopt him. As she owned the local butchery, I felt his good life would continue, with the additional bounty of an endless supply of beef and bones.
However, there was nothing to ease the sadness of parting from people I had known all my life. Friends gathered on the small iron railway station.
‘Ma muk, ma muk! Goodbye, goodbye!’ cried Kati and Nym, an Aboriginal man and wife standing apart from the others, barefoot, forlorn; no loud weeping, no bloodletting as of old bush farewells, just a gentle hand on head, a sorrowful, ‘I cry long my bingy for you.’ I never heard of Kati and Nym again. When my father returned to disperse his shooting plant soon after settling Mother and me in Brisbane, they had left. They may have gone bush, back to tribal life.
This journey from Pine Creek was to be my last on old Leaping Lena. We lunched at Adelaide River Station as usual—where the punkah wallah still pulled the cord with his toe—then on to Darwin.
We took berth on the P&O ship Merkur. With the band playing on the wharf and streamers cascading about us, women waved our handkerchiefs, men their hats. The deep sonorous blast of the ship’s horn signalled we were under way.
Our streamers grew taut. I gripped the coloured paper ribbon with a childish desperation, my last tangible link with home, until it snapped apart from those on shore. In silence I watched the cliffs above the harbour grow distantly dim, then disappear as the ship sailed into open sea and away from every familiar thing.
For me, a foreign land lay beyond that harbour. What did I know about a land that wasn’t populated with half-naked Aboriginal people, and men who travelled on horseback? When I arrived in Brisbane, men everywhere were in military uniform. For a child of the bush, the transition was overwhelming.
How like a bush Aboriginal I was! My mother couldn’t keep my shoes on—I discarded them in the most unlikely places, and often never found them again. She finally settled on oversized button-over canvas sandshoes, or plimsolls, and I flapped unhappily about in those.
I knew the Aboriginal name for most things and I was a dab hand at finger talk. I still retrieved objects from the ground with my toes and pointed rudely with the chin, but in all my ten years I had never seen a rose, a peach or myriad other things most European children took for granted. I gazed enthralled at pictures of Italian grape arbours in National Geographic and marvelled at the abundance of fruit hanging there—bush tucker never produced that luxuriantly.
I went about in a constant state of wonder. At night I stared up at the city’s neon lights: Johnny Walker brandishing his whisky bottle and actually walking—how do they do that? Then a glittering polar bear, jerkily licking a never-diminishing ice-cream. The multi-coloured lights held me spellbound in this unbelievable world.
During the day there were flower and fruit stalls, pet shops—what was a hamster? No need for me to take in a fun fair: a ride on the escalator in Penny’s Department Store or on a noisy tramcar was novelty enough.
Somehow, certainly in an unguarded moment, I was allowed to accompany my mother to a garden party at Government House. In the midst of an elegant, subdued gathering, I declared to all that there was a blackfellow’s grave up in a tree. I would neither desist nor retreat from the spot until a kindly official explained it was the trunk of a large fern among the branches, by which time a curious crowd had gathered about this strange child holding forth in her sandshoes on Aboriginal funerary habit, and my mother thought it time to leave.
/> Then off to boarding school, high on a hill overlooking the city—just like that! But it wasn’t really ‘just like that’ at all: it was a daunting undertaking for this child of the wild. Unlike mixing with the exotic and varied collection of inmates at the Darwin Convent, at my fashionable Brisbane girls school one had to weave a tricky path through the social hazards of its urbane students.
No tumblers of Epsom salts here. Instead, monogrammed china and good silver, all in a panelled Tudor dining room, uniformed maids, and our own Rolls-Royce, in which I was occasionally taken to the dentist. The central school building was a gracious old mansion, with marble fireplaces and tapestry bell pulls in rooms converted into dormitories for the younger students.
I took to all of this like a duck to a paddy-field. My mother’s friends tut-tutted and said, ‘Poor child, such a culture shock.’ But it was a journey of constant discovery. The shock was in reverse; the other girls were fascinated and unbelieving. Their fathers were business and professional men. I told them that my father was a buffalo hunter and former mounted trooper who’d ridden hundreds of miles with his Aboriginal trackers. ‘Such lies,’ they said. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’
At night I lay in bed and marvelled at the carpet of coloured city lights glittering far down beneath our hill. But then cold nights arrived and the wind screamed around our perch, rattling and clawing at the slatted blinds that inadequately covered the huge windows.
My first Brisbane winter was disastrous for my health. Tropical animal that I was, I had never experienced anything like it. I suffered the agony of chilblains, while nobody else had them. Playing netball on early winter mornings was torment, chronic chest problems plagued me, and I was forced to wear fleece-lined vests and voluminous bloomers, much to my embarrassment and the hilarity of the other girls.
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