Across the country north to south

It’s always nice to visit your own backyard and there’s a lot of backyard in Australia. Especially when you can travel in comfort. A few days in Darwin, a trip from Darwin to Adelaide on the iconic Ghan train, then a few days in Adelaide sounded like a great idea. I’d never been to Darwin and although we’d been on the Ghan (last century) back then it only went from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It would be a very comfortable adventure.

First stop was Darwin, where we stayed at the Double Tree by Hilton. We got a good look at the city from the air because of an aborted landing due to wind gusts. Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, sits on the edge of the Timor Sea and has a reputation as both frontier town and tropical gateway. With its mix of Indigenous heritage, World War II history, and multicultural influences from Southeast Asia, the city feels unlike anywhere else in the country. Cyclone Tracy’s devastation in 1974 reshaped Darwin into the modern, low-rise settlement visitors see today, while its bustling markets, proximity to national parks like Kakadu and Litchfield, and laid-back lifestyle make it a starting point for exploring the Top End.

The trouble with Kakadu and Litchfield is that both destinations are full-on day tours. We settled for Crocosaurus Cove, an attraction in the middle of town, to see crocs and other reptiles. Its big claim to fame is “the cage of death” experience. A person prepared to pay for the privilege is set up in a perspex cage and lowered into a tank containing a 5m+ salt water crocodile. As far as the crocs are concerned, people are items on the menu. Crocs are stealth hunters and being poikilothermic they don’t need to eat much, or often. But they’re also smart and curious. Since they’re in captivity, it’s important to give them mental stimulation. And that’s what this cage experience is all about – entertaining the crocs – and the people watching. I would have had a go but I hadn’t brought my bathers.

There are also other reptiles in the facility, some deadly, some cute. See if you can work out the difference.

At the hotel we were told about a hop on-hop off bus that did tours of Darwin’s main sites. They cost $45 each for a day ticket. But we found out that seniors could use the public bus system for free, which is a rather better price. We caught a local bus to the Darwin aviation museum. (We got off a stop too far, but a little walk didn’t hurt us).

The museum contains quite a few iconic aircraft, including the spectacular B52, the F1-11, a Phantom, a Sabre, and heaps of others. There are many displays of equipment, uniforms, and little stories. There were several exhibits and a short film about the 1919 Great Air Race, a competition for £10,000 offered by the Australian government for the first Australian crew to fly a British-built aircraft from England to Darwin within 30 days. Ross and Keith Smith won the race, completing the journey in their Vickers Vimy bomber in 28 days, arriving on December 10, 1919. These days we can fly on a commercial flight from Perth to London in 17 hours.

A number of exhibits concerned Australia’s introduction to the war in the Pacific. On 19 February 1942, Darwin was bombed in the first and largest foreign attack ever mounted on Australian soil. More than 180 Japanese aircraft struck the harbour, airfields, and town, dropping more bombs on Darwin in that single raid than had fallen on Pearl Harbor just weeks earlier. Ships were sunk, buildings flattened, and hundreds of people killed. Darwin would endure more than 60 air raids over the next two years as Japan sought to cripple Australia’s northern defences. For decades the scale of the devastation was downplayed, but the bombing remains a stark reminder of how close the war came to Australia’s shores. Darwin wasn’t the only city targeted. Japanese bombers attacked Katherine, Broome, Wyndham, Derby, Townsville, and Port Hedland. I don’t think too many Aussies know that.

Just 32 years later Darwin was destroyed again. Cyclone Tracy is well remembered by my generation. In the early hours of Christmas Day 1974, the storm tore through Darwin with winds of more than 240 kilometres an hour. Three-quarters of the city’s homes were destroyed or left uninhabitable, essential services collapsed, and 66 people lost their lives. In the aftermath, most of the population was evacuated to southern states, leaving a near-empty shell where a thriving community had stood. The disaster prompted one of the largest reconstruction efforts in Australia’s history, reshaping Darwin into the modern, low-rise city it is today. Twice in a single generation, Darwin was knocked down and forced to rebuild, its survival becoming part of the city’s identity.

By world standards, Cyclone Tracy was a small but incredibly intense cyclone, with gale-force winds extending only about 50 km from its center at landfall. Darwin’s residents were unprepared due to it being Christmas Eve and a lack of recent severe cyclones in Darwin. And (unlike today) their homes were not built to withstand storms of that ferocity

In a snippet of personal history, Peter and his family was on its way to Australia around that time. About a week before Christmas, his flight from London landed at Darwin to refuel, having flown through a tropical storm that became Tracy. The passengers crowded into a stinking hot, tin-roofed shed that served as the terminal. They were lucky to be able to carry on to Melbourne before all hell broke loose.

On our last evening in Darwin we went on a dinner cruise on Darwin’s harbour. I’d feared the sunset was going to be a fizzer, with too much cloud to put on a show. I was wrong.

Tomorrow we’ll be joining the Ghan.

By the way, if you want to look at the whole trip, tap here.