Darwin – Off We Go

**Davey cooking up chicken curry for our dinner in Katherine**

Part 1: Traveller Torture

When we arrived in Katherine after two nights in Kakadu, all the Woolworths assistants were wearing masks, a large crowd was shopping at 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and the bread had completely sold out. We had been mostly without coverage in Kakadu and our phones now flashed us notifications that explained people’s strange behaviour. Darwin had gone into lockdown two hours before our arrival in Katherine, and the premier of South Australia, in a fit of premature panic, had sealed his state from all aliens, or rather, other Australians. The West Australian Premier had sealed his border too.

I am not against carefully restricting the movements of people who have been in a hotspot, but locking everyone out of half of Australia because of one case in a remote mine? If only Australian governments could be more measured in their reactions, more rational in weighing up all the risks involved, more systematic in buying a range of vaccines, and more competent in rolling them out.

“We have nowhere to go,” was a common refrain in the Katherine Holiday Park. I felt for our fellow travellers. Some had booked and paid for accommodation, flights and cruises in the Kimberley; they discovered now that their mere presence in the Northern Territory—not even in a hotspot—would oblige them to quarantine for 14 days at their own expense if they crossed into Western Australia.

**We realised that we had achieved the partner look quite unintentionally.**

“We could just drive around in circles,” I said to Davey.

“There are no circles in the Northern Territory,” he replied. “There are just roads that take you from north to south or east to west.”

He spends too much time looking at maps, but it can be useful.

For once our lack of planning proved to be a blessing. We had tried to book a site in Alice Springs* but it was lucky that we had failed, since South Australia was no longer a possible way home. The north to south road was out.

So we filled in our Queensland Travel Declaration, downloaded it while we still had mobile coverage, and headed south towards Three Ways to take the road east.

* A Queenslander at Camooweal commented that he expected Alice Springs to go into lockdown, since the mine workers flew in and out of that airport. His words were prescient: the very next day, June 30, Alice Springs also went into a precautionary lockdown.

Part 2: Kakadu

We found Kakadu quite difficult to navigate, perhaps not surprisingly, given its size. Whereas there were simple online fact sheets for both Keep and Litchfield, which provided precise details about all the best short walks in one straightforward file, Kakadu’s documentation was fragmentary and confusing. There were PDFs about some walks, yet without information about the walk’s location in the park and how to get to the starting point. It seemed as though there was no clear overarching plan aimed at making the features of the park as easily accessible as possible.

It looked as though much of the park infrastructure had been set up in the 1980s and then allowed to disintegrate slowly and inexorably. The signage on some of the walks and the tracks themselves clearly needed upgrading, especially when compared to the beautifully maintained signage and tracks at Litchfield.

Kakadu is administered by the federal government, and it shows.

Yet there is so much that is not to be missed at Kakadu, such as the rock art sites at Ubirr and Burrungkuy (Nourlangie). At Ubirr we had the feeling, as we had at Nigli Gap in Keep, that we were encountering a world from days long gone, a place where people had lived vibrant, mysterious and unimaginable lives far removed from ours.

**A lily contrasts with the lush green of the grass.**

Mandy Muir of the Murrumbur clan was our tour guide during our cruise on Yellow Waters. She is an Indigenous woman who has family connections in both Kakadu and the Kimberley and who has worked on the wetlands for over 30 years. It was an utter delight to be in her company. She told us of her youth in this magical “backyard” and revealed the depth of her knowledge at every twist and turn of her amazingly manoeuvrable boat.

Mandy could name every kind of bird on the waters, tell us where and how old their nests were, identify the trees where their young were about to spread their wings, and point out hidden inlets where crocodiles were hunting barramundi in plain sight. At one point, as a crocodile was closing in on its prey, the barramundi in danger from those mighty jaws leapt over the scaly body and fled into open water. It seemed that our tour guide knew exactly where to take us so that we could watch the wetland creatures and appreciate their idiosyncrasies.

As we drove through the waters teeming with bird life, Mandy drew in close to the banks so that we could snap shots of the fat crocodiles lying along the muddy edges. She also provided insights into the difficulties of administering the park and touched on the problems caused by feral animals such as buffaloes. Her warmth, humour and generosity were as memorable as the wetlands themselves.

***A crocodile on the bank of Yellow Waters – we saw many of them sunning themselves and making no attempt at camouflage.***

Final Notes and Comments
Accommodation

Jabiru Crocodile Hotel (classy and genuinely luxurious)
Djarradjin (Muirella Park) (a lovely spot—but we ate inside our tent to avoid the mosquitoes)
Katherine Holiday Park (they clean the kitchens here!—always chockablock, but professionally run)
Banka Banka Station (the COVID crisis put paid to the evening damper, but we loved this spot—our last night in the NT)

A List of the Birds We Saw on Yellow Waters:

Jabirus, egrets, brolgas, snake-necked darters, brolgas, spoonbills, magpie geese, plumed whistling ducks, white-bellied sea eagles… There were others but I didn’t catch all their names!

A Pertinent Quotation from the Ever-Quotable Katherine Murphy:

The default in Australia throughout this pandemic has been risk aversion. (The Guardian, 30-6-2021)

**A snake-necked darter looks over its territory.**

**A view over Banka Banka Station, our last overnight stop during our hasty exit from the Northern Territory**

A colourful croc on a Darwin wall

We slept in our little tent for 50 nights straight between our cabin in Ravensthorpe and our hotel in Darwin.

During that time, I didn’t fantasise about beds at all. Well, only occasionally.

All the same, sleeping in the Cavenagh Hotel room in Darwin undoubtedly had its pleasures: stretching out in bed, napping during the late afternoon in an air-conditioned room and, most luxurious of all, having a toilet only 3 metres away.

**Jabiru – street sculpture by Indigenous artist, Janice Pungautiji Murray**

Our room was rather dark, with a skylight but no windows. It was the exact opposite of being in the natural world. To my surprise, even while I enjoyed the comforts of city living, I missed waking up with the dawn and listening to the birds.

There were of course many consolations, especially the fleshpots of the inner city. All the way along Knuckey and Bennett Streets were diverse restaurants, bars and ice cream shops, rocking even on Monday night. We particularly liked Moorish, with its hints of Northern Africa and Spain, and Johnn Johnn’s for a dessert ice cream.

**Art through projections of light – by a Darwin Indigenous artist, Dotty Fejo**

On every street there were references to the Larrakia people, the traditional owners of Darwin, who number about 2000 and who have survived and prospered, like Darwin itself, against the odds. We were astonished by the quality and abundance of Aboriginal art works, some originating also from further south in the Northern Territory. If only our house still had some empty walls and the kinds of spacious rooms that might give those representations of the outback due impact.

As the target of human foes and the victim of natural disasters, Darwin has a rich modern as well as ancient history. At the Darwin Military Museum, I discovered that in 1938 it took nine days to fly from Sydney to London, with Darwin as the last Australian stop. The Japanese attacks from 1942 onwards were far more frequent and widespread than I had ever assumed; the raids continued for 20 months after 19 February, 1942, and included towns as far flung as Broome, Derby, Townsville and Exmouth. Although the loss of life and destruction of property at Pearl Harbour were far greater than during the first raid on Darwin, there was a similarity between the two attacks, in that each struck an unsuspecting population and brought a foreign war back home.

**The location of Japanese raids in the twenty months after February, 1942**

The introductory film about the first Japanese attack was moving and cleverly conceived, with old footage brought to life by additional modern effects such as flames curling around ships and buildings. One of the saddest parts of the film was the story of the nine workers in the Post Office who were killed outright.

When David pressured me to visit Parliament House, I replied snootily that I doubted it would be worth the effort, but I was wrong. The former upper house had been converted into a library, a quiet and appealing space offering respite from the infernal, draining heat outside; it was adorned with paintings, documents, commemorative quilts, historical references, and wall posters of lucidly explained information. All upper houses in Australian states should share the same happy fate.

Insights into how women’s magazines portrayed the situation in Darwin after Cyclone Tracy in 1974 – from the Upper House Library

Having taken advantage of numerous services in Darwin, including an optometrist, a car mechanic and a hair stylist, we felt ready to roll out our tent again for the long drive south*—and in my case to wake up once more with the sun and the birds.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

* At the time of writing this post, we were planning to drive home via South Australia to avoid the COVID outbreaks in the eastern states. That idea came to a sticky end.

♦ We left Darwin 2 and a half days before it went into lockdown. Sheer dumb luck.

**Davey takes a break in one of the seats hewed out of a tree that are placed invitingly around the Darwin Botanic Gardens.**

Final Notes and Comments
♦ Accommodation
The Cavenagh, 12 Cavenagh Street, Darwin (ideal location in the town centre)

♦ Fun Fact from the Military Museum: The word “jeep” comes from “GP” for “general purpose” vehicle. Initially, I thought that this might be an urban myth, but it was corroborated by my Oxford app.

♦ The Botanic Gardens represented many different habitats, including rainforests, eucalyptus woodlands, Tiwi wet forests and Madagascar baobabs, with a guest appearance by our own beloved boab, Adansonia gregorii.