Four days in Darwin

In my last post I wrote about the two days it took me to get 1600km to Darwin from Mount Isa. Now I had four days where I planned no driving at all. The name of my motel was City Edge which described it perfectly, nowhere was too far to walk to. Darwin Harbour had surprisingly high cliff faces with a large tidal range and there were great views over the harbour and out to the Arafura Sea.

There is a long and pleasant path along the cliffside promenade. From where I stood to Cox Peninsula on the other side of the harbour was a long 120km journey thanks to the harbour’s many channels. Though much shorter by ferry.

It didn’t take long to find a reminder of the Second World War. I’ve written about the bombing of Darwin, based on the book An Awkward Truth. The book was critical of the lack of preparation and secrecy that hamstrung recovery efforts but it lauded great courage. The Japanese bombing raid took place February 19, 1942 with the sinking of the US destroyer Peary the biggest loss of life. In the 1950s a diver salvaged this four-inch gun from the ship. The Australian Navy restored it for the 50th anniversary in 1992. The gun points to Peary’s final resting place.

Further along the promenade is parliament house, the seat of the Northern Territory’s unicameral Legislative Assembly. Building work commenced in 1990 and it opened in 1994. According to the NT parliament website, the building was designed for Darwin’s tropical climate.”Its facade diffuses 80% of direct sunlight.  Visitors are invited to note the top of each of the corner columns of the building, which represent an architectural salute to the site on which Parliament House stands.”

I gave architectural salute to another building celebrating a different branch of government. The Supreme Court lies south of parliament house. The building was officially opened in November 1991 when the government proclaimed it “shall be surrendered and delivered to the Judges of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory for the administration of justice in and for the Northern Territory of Australia”.

The trifecta of government buildings in the area is completed by government house. Of distinctly older vintage, the NT Governor’s home dates from 1870, the oldest surviving European building in the city. The mid-Victorian Gothic villa has been adapted for the local climate with shaded verandahs and porches and has survived earthquakes, cyclones and Japanese bombing.

Moving along I get my first view down to the revamped portside. Raised stairwells and lifts offer a quick way down but I detour to a museum dedicated to part of the city’s war story.

My destination is the underground oil storage tanks. When the Japanese bombed Darwin in 1942 a major target was the open air fuel oil storage tanks at Stokes Hill. As a result engineers began looking at designs to put the tanks in underground tunnels. In 1943 contractors began work on a series of tunnels 15m under the escarpment. The longest tunnel was 200m long and pipe headings connected to an underground pumping station. The tanks were designed to hold distillate, diesel and furnace oil. Work was hard and slow and the tunnels leaked. Corrosion set in as water seeped between the steel lining and concrete walls. The tunnels were kept secret after the war and stored fuel for the RAAF until heavy rain made the system inoperable. It was opened to the public in 1992.

The portside area has been used for thousands of years by the Larrakiah people who traded sea cucumbers with Macassan sailors. In 1865, surveyor W.P. Auld named Stokes Hill after the Commander of the Beagle who visited in 1839. The port was named for Beagle‘s most famous passenger Charles Darwin. The first of three wharfs was built in 1885. With an 8m tidal range the jetty stood high on timber piles. Cyclone damage in 1897 and worm infestation weakened the structure and the second wharf was built in 1903. It was severely damaged in the first Japanese bombing raid. The third and current Stokes Hill Wharf was built of steel and concrete in 1956 with timber decking. It served as the main port of Darwin until facilities transferred to the new Port at East Arm in 2000. The Wharf was transformed into a tourist precinct of bars and cafes.

Day two took me towards the northerly bays. Above is Doctors Gully, home of the fish-feeding establishment Aquascene (feeding times are tide related so it was closed on low tide as I arrived). The area is named for Dr Robert Peel, medical officer with Goyder’s survey party in 1869. This was an important site of Chinese market gardens and in the war was a base for Catalina Flying Boats.

Continuing north I came to Cullen Bay, home of the Marina and ferries to the Tiwi Islands and Mandorah on the Cox Peninsula. It was also the home of a lovely pub called Lola’s Pergola where I stopped to soak in the seaside atmosphere.

It was a Thursday so I kept on the northward journey towards Mindil Beach and the Mindil night markets. The markets date to 1987 and they moved from their original location at Darwin Mall after local businesses complained. They have been under the coconut palms of Mindil Beach ever since and host 300 stalls every Thursday and Sunday evenings, with thousands of visitors looking for bargains, live music and great food.

There was a film crew on the beach. A close-up of the clapperboard revealed it was a scene in Top End Wedding. According to Screen Australia, this new feature film co-written and starring Larrakiah local Miranda Tapsell and directed by Wayne Blair is a “hilarious and heart-warming comedy of successful Sydney lawyer, Lauren, and her fiance Ned. Engaged and in love, they have just 10 days to find Lauren’s mother who has gone AWOL somewhere in the Northern Territory, reunite her parents and pull off their dream Top End Wedding.” Not sure about the movie but I was told off about the clicking of my phone camera on set.

What the filmmakers and everyone else were here for was the famous Mindil sunset. Mindil comes from the Larrakiah word ‘Min-deel’, meaning sweet nut grass. The beach has always been a popular place to camp and swim and was a significant cultural site. In the war years it was a rest site for military personnel. Cyclone Tracy destroyed a caravan park on the site in 1974.

Another day, another beach. Fannie Bay Beach is north of Mindil Beach and part of the East Point Reserve. Behind the beach is Fannie Bay Gaol, site of the NT’s last execution and now home to a museum. The water looks inviting but the “danger: crocodiles” signs are everywhere. Best to stay out and admire the view.

At East Point Reserve is a monument (and empty beer bottle) commemorating the arrival of the first flight from England to Australia in 1919. After the First World War the Australian government offered £10,000 for the first Australians in a British aircraft to fly from Britain to Australia. Six entries started the race and the winners were co-pilot brothers Ross and Keith Smith and two mechanics, flying a Vickers Vimy bomber. The Vimy left Hounslow Heath on November 12. It flew 17,911km via Lyon, Rome, Cairo, Damascus, Basra, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta, Akyab (Sittwe), Rangoon, Singora (Songkhla), Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta) and Surabaya, reaching Darwin on December 10.

A friend alerted me that Shellie Morris was playing in Darwin that night. Sadly I was already double booked but found the Garrmalang festival where Morris was playing had a free opening event I could attend. Garrmalang is the Larrakiah word for Darwin and the Festival showcases Indigenous talent and celebrates song, dance, language, knowledge, heritage, family and country.

The reason I couldn’t hang around to watch Morris was a date with the Deckchair Cinema, the cinema under the stars on Darwin’s tropical waterfront. There I sat in one of the deckchairs, enjoyed a beer or two and watched an excellent movie (The Death of Stalin) in balmy surrounds with the occasional bat reminding me I was outdoors.

On my last morning I walked past Mindil Beach to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. NT’s premier cultural organisation has been at Bullocky Point since 1981, and is home to internationally renowned cultural and scientific collections and research and exhibition programs. These include Sweetheart, a 5m crocodile caught and accidentally killed in 1979. The body was presented to the Museum where the taxidermist prepared Sweetheart as a skin mount and a skeleton.

The Cyclone Tracy exhibit tells the story of the weather event that ripped through Darwin on Christmas Day 1974. It features the sound booth which captures the spine-chilling howling gales that caused so much destruction that day. The Category 4 Tracy is the most compact cyclone ever in the Southern Hemisphere, with gale-force winds extending only 48km from the centre. Tracy killed 71 people, caused $837m damage, destroyed more than 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings leaving half the city’s 47,000 inhabitants homeless and required the evacuation of 30,000 people.

The museum’s most interesting exhibit was by local artist and cartoonist Franck Gohier. His exhibition “A thousand miles from everywhere” cover the major themes of Gohier’s work from the global influence of Pop art and capitalism to the bombing of Darwin, Cyclone Tracy and the city itself. Inspired by the anarchic spirit of punk, Gohier has been making art since the 1980s studying at Charles Darwin University. Importantly, Gohier has made a career in Darwin, with regular exhibitions in Sydney and public institutions in the southern states.

On my way home I popped into the peaceful George Brown Botanic Gardens (named for a former Darwin mayor). The gardens cover 42 hectares with a notable collection of north Australian and tropical species. The gardens are a popular exercise spot and often combined with a visit to the Mindil Beach Sunset Markets. The gardens have been in Darwin for over 130 years, surviving bombs and cyclones. This is one of the few botanic gardens in the world with marine and estuarine plants growing naturally.

Note c 2020: I saw Top End Wedding a few years later. It was better than I thought it would be. My phone clicking was thankfully edited out of the beach scene.

A drive from Mount Isa to Darwin

About 16 years ago I drove with friends from Brisbane to Alice Springs and Uluru. I’d never been back so I was looking forward to two weeks on the road to renew acquaintance with the Red Centre. But the Red Centre is not really part of the Northern Territory’s Never Never, where I’d never ever been. So I was also looking forward to a week in Darwin and Katherine checking out the top end of the Top End. That meant a lot of driving, something I was well used to in my time in Mount Isa. Isa to Darwin was first up, a journey of 1600km over two days. This first photo is from the Queensland side of the border (though I can’t remember exactly where). I’ve covered the Isa-Tennant Creek stretch in another blog post about a trip to the Devils Marbles so won’t dwell on it here.

About 50km across the border, just past Avon Downs, I bumped into Irish “world walker” Tony Mangan. The 61-year-old Dubliner is walking his buggy “Karma” around the world. The former ultra-marathon runner is used to world travel and has been on this journey since 2016, relying on the generosity of locals while he spreads his message of awareness that “early cancer screening saves lives”. I met him in Mount Isa a week earlier and wrote about him and his journey. I knew I’d pass him somewhere on the highway. After a brief chat I agreed to hide one of his heavy large water bottles at the 300km marker to Stuart Highway (90kms further west) which he found a few days later. We both continued on to Darwin but I beat him by about one and a half months.

About seven hours into the journey I got to the Three Ways. This roadhouse is named for the junction between the Barkly Hwy from Mount Isa and Queensland and the Stuart Hwy linking Alice Springs and Darwin. I had never been north of this point before and Darwin was another 1000km away. I considered staying at the motel here but it was expensive at $170 a room. With an hour or two of daylight left I decided to take my chances further north.

I passed a beautiful clump of rock about 100km north of Three Ways. Called Lubra’s Lookout, this flat topped rocky outcrop is at Pamayu. As the name suggests, it was an Aboriginal women’s meeting place. There was a climb with great views but I didn’t know about it at the time. Besides, I was getting anxious about finding a bed for the night.

Renner Springs Desert Hotel was in the right place at the right time. Situated 5km north of Lubra’s Lookout, I approached it near dark and found the cost of a room was considerably cheaper than Three Ways, though there was no Internet. It was a good place with simple food and few customers. I chatted over a beer with a camper who was cycling from Swan Hill in Victoria to Broome, WA. I wasn’t going to complain to him about any distances I was doing in the comfort of my car.

Renner Springs is named for Dr Frederick Renner who tended the workers on the Overland Telegraph Line in 1871. Dr Renner’s diary records a large gathering of birds and while investigating he discovered nearby Mud Springs. The Mud Springs and the lagoon still support a large range of birdlife. It was a pleasant walk around the property at dusk.

A beautiful Northern Territory sunrise greeted me the next morning on a ridge north of Renner Springs. I was out at first light around 7am beaten by the cyclist who had already cycled an hour north in the dark. I still had 900km to go to Darwin, though with the 130km speed limit, I expected to make it by mid-afternoon.

This monument 50km south of Daly Waters celebrates the Overland Telegraph Line which linked Australia to communication from the rest of the world in the 19th century. Called the Sir Charles Todd Memorial or the Telegraph Memorial, the first name remembers Charles Todd the Post Master General, Superintendent of Telegraphs and Government Astronomer of South Australia. The monument is near the spot where the final join of the telegraph line was made on August, 22 1872. The monument pays tribute to those who built the telegraph line and also to Scottish drover and explorer John Ross, who kept a diary of the Overland Telegraph Survey Expedition. The line was a great civil engineering feat and Todd drove the project to its successful end. He sent the first telegraphic message: “We have this day, within two years, completed a line of communications two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia, until a few years ago a terra incognita believed to be a desert.”

This is another human-made monument, though not obvious at first glance. The talking termite mound in Mataranka, 400km south of Darwin, is the “largest man-made termite mound in the world”, though I wonder what the competition is for that title. Mataranka is home of the “never never” from Jeannie Gunn’s book “We of the Never Never” about her life on the land at nearby Elsey Station. The phrase “Never Never” was first used to describe the vast wilderness of the northern Australian Outback in Barcroft Boake’s poem “Where the Dead Men Lie” published in the Bulletin in 1891: “Out on the wastes of the Never Never / That’s where the dead men lie!”

Mataranka had hot artesian springs but getting close to lunchtime it was food I needed not a spa bath so I drove 100km further north to Katherine. With a population of 6000 it was the biggest settlement between Mount Isa and Darwin, though a lot closer to the latter than the former. I found a lunch spot but didn’t hang around. I still had two and a half hours driving to Darwin and I would be back in Katherine later in the week to check out beautiful Nitmiluk Gorge.

I kept going to the end of the Stuart Highway, After 1600km and two days driving I was glad to get to Darwin and luxuriate in 30 degree winter warmth. After checking in to my motel I checked the lovely view over the harbour and out to the Arafura Sea. I had four days to explore Darwin and was looking forward to getting to know her.

Ten Favourite albums: 10 Andy Irvine / Paul Brady

When it came down to deciding my ten favourite albums there were some that picked themselves and some that came down to decision making that was fine-tuned (literally and figuratively). I picked nine albums but left one one spare for what my favourite album is of the moment (so this list will change if I do it again – I’m already half regretting plumping for This is The Sea ahead of Fisherman’s Blues in the Waterboys choice).

I grew up amid Irish music but Horslips aside – it mostly passed me by. Even then I liked Horslips (and the later Moving Hearts) for their modern slant on traditional airs. A band called Planxty was also doing innovative things in the 1970s. But I probably dismissed it as “diddley-eidley” music without understanding the brilliance that went into it.

In recent years I’ve come back to their music through the extraordinary body of work of Christy Moore, a dominating presence in Irish music for almost 50 years, and a founder of Planxty and Moving Hearts. I can’t find the Youtube link now but there is live concert footage of Moore introducing the members of Planxty, saying three of them (Moore, bouzouki player Donal Lunny and the world’s best uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn, who sadly died this year) came from the same Irish county – Kildare. The fourth member Andy Irvine, joked Moore, was from “god knows where”.

Irvine was London-born to Irish and Scottish parents, and a classically trained musician who switched to folk after discovering Woody Guthrie. He moved to Dublin in the 1960s but an abiding influence was a trip to the Balkans in 1968 where he was enchanted by Bulgarian music. Irvine invented the Irish bouzouki tuning his instrument one octave lower than the open-tuned mandolin. He introduced Lunny to the bouzouki while Irvine played mandolin in Planxty.

The band was hugely successful in its early days but touring took its toll with Lunny and Moore dropping out. Yet Lunny continued to work with the band while Moore was replaced on vocals by the brilliant young Northern Irish talent Paul Brady. Brady and Irvine struck up an instant friendship and enjoyed each other’s work.

It didn’t take long for the idea of an album as a duo. The album Andy Irvine/Paul Brady was released at the end of 1976 after Planxty finally broke up – though with Lunny involved it seemed like another Planxty album in exile. Irish master fiddler Kevin Burke played violin.

The album opens with Irvine’s arrangement of traditional English ballad Plains of Kildare (ironic as the only non-Kildare man in the original Planxty) about the 18th century horse Skewball and its racing feats at The Curragh. Irvine’s jig in 3 4 time elegantly transitions to an instrumental middle eight in Bulgarian rachenitsa rhythm of 7 8 time to suggest the gallop of racehorses, before slowing down for the final verse.

Irvine’s musical invention shows again on the second song, the Ulster love song Lough Erne Shore sung by Brady. Irvine played hurdy-gurdy making it seem the instrument’s drones were capable of playing chords. “I recorded three different drones on the hurdy-gurdy,” Irvine said. “We cross faded them on the mix to fit the chords. It’s very subtle and you may not hear it but I thought it gave it a great feeling.” The effect is Oriental and is my favourite song on the album.

According to the sleeve notes, Fred Finn’s Reel/Sailing into Walpole’s Marsh” are reels learnt from a northern Irish trio Deirdre Shannon (fiddle), Brian Bailey (flute) and Trevor Stewart (uilleann pipes). Bonny Woodhall is Irvine’s interpretation of Scottish folk song Bonny Woodha, the poignant story of a miner who must leave his lover to fight in the king’s war.

War also features in Arthur McBride and the Sergeant, an 1840 Irish anti-recruiting song which Irvine had recorded with Planxty. Brady makes it his own with this stirring rendition. The Jolly Soldier continues the martial theme, Brady singing of the love-lorn soldier, a variation of English ballad Earl Brand but without its grim death tally. “Don’t despise a soldier just because he poor / He’s as happy on the battlefield as at the barrack door.”

Autumn Gold is Irvine’s song about his experiences in Eastern Europe. The sadness of departure and the changing seasons are reflected in the lyrics. “Time to leave my friends behind / I leave this town with you on my mind / The dead leaves are burning, the year is decaying / Winter returning, no use in delaying.”

The Northern Ireland Troubles were likely in Brady’s mind as he sang the love song Mary and the Soldier. “For when you’re in a foreign land / Believe me you’ll rue it surely / Perhaps in battle I might fall / From a shot from an angry cannonball.” The same gloomy sense pervades The Streets of Derry, a traditional air sung by Irvine, recorded three years after the terrible events of Bloody Sunday. “As he was a-marching through the streets of Derry / I’m sure he marched up right manfully / Being much more like a commanding officer / Than a man to die upon a gallows tree.” Martinmas Time is more of the same – trenchant commentary disguised as an ancient ballad. “It fell out upon one Martinmas time / When snow lay on the border / There came a troop of soldiers here / To take up their winter quarters.”

The effect of the album is inescapably political. Great traditional music played by dazzling musicians at the peak of their powers but with a message bang up to date. It still resonates with great power four decades later. No wonder they have often re-played the entire album in concert. Musicianship with a message at its finest and deserving a spot in my Top 10.

The full list

1: Horslips – Dancehall Sweethearts (1974)

2: Brian Eno David Byrne – My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

3: The The – Soul Mining (1983)

4: The Waterboys – This is the Sea (1985)

5: The Smiths – The Queen is Dead (1986)

6: Mercury Rev – Deserter’s Songs (1998)

7: Cat Power – The Greatest (2004)

8: Radiohead – In Rainbows (2007)

9: Iggy Pop – The Idiot (1977)

10: Andy Irvine / Paul Brady (1976)