Australasia > Australia > Northern Territories > Darwin > Articles > Darwin - Getting crocked in a Aussie frontier town

Everyone will tell you that Darwin, the rugged little capital of Australia’s vast Northern Territory, is a fun-loving, hard drinking town. They’re not wrong.

Soon after my arrival in this clean, green, friendly city built on the edge of the Timor Sea, I foolishly accepted an invitation to join a traditional Saturday night pub-crawl. Next morning, I not only woke up in the wrong hotel room, but the wrong hotel. Tearing open my window curtain at dawn, what should have been a sea view was arid outback.

Local legislation restricts drinking within two kilometers of a liquor store, but this is a hard law to obey because there seem to be liquor stores, or mini-breweries, on every street corner. There are even so called ‘drive-in bottle shops,’ which allow Darwinians to slake their thirst without the irksome problem of having to get out of their jeeps.

Founded as a British outpost in 1839 to protect Australia from Dutch challengers in the East Indies just to the north, Darwin today still has the sleepy air of a South Pacific port town - as Honolulu might have looked 70 years ago. The seaside air is scented with the sweet fragrance of jasmine and plumeria, and many of the wood-framed houses are set back behind flowering bougainvillea hedges. Large men, bronzed by the desert sun, wear shorts and rubber thongs year round, and everyone seems to have that cheerful, slightly sun-dazzled look that farmyard puppies have on sunny summer afternoons, pleased with the sweetness of life in a warm climate.

More than any other Australians, Darwinians delight in their own reputation as a wild frontier community. The reputation is based on reality: the city fronts the blue Timor Sea, a body of water abundantly infested with salt-water crocodiles. Coastal beaches are marked with red-painted warning signs, and each year the city government hauls out 100 crocodiles from Darwin Harbour, and carts them off to more remote locations. The largest local croc ever captured was a monster nicknamed “Sweetheart,” which had menaced fishermen for years. It was just under 16 feet, and weighed over 120 stones. Annoyed by the noise of outboard motors, Sweetheart would surface behind a fishing dingy, grasp the whirling propeller blades in its jaws and casually spit them out - to the pop-eyed terror of the boat’s occupants.

Sweetheart was finally captured in 1979, and the colossal dinosaur-like skeleton is now the highlight of the small but superb Darwin Museum.

Though isolated from the rest of the continent by the vast Australian Outback, Darwin’s 150,000 residents are arguably the most progressive, outward looking of Australia’s people. Perched on the south edge of Asia, it has had long links with the East, and its population is today a lively cultural cocktail. At least a quarter of the population is Aborigine, with the balance provided by white Australians, Malays, Indonesians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Japanese and Pacific Islanders.

The first Chinese came through in the 1870s en route to the gold mines of Western Australia. So many stayed on that by 1890 the Chinese outnumbered the whites. In the 1980s Darwin’s most popular mayor was a Chinese-Australian, and today Chinese-Australians own large portions of the city.

Darwinians lived in splendid isolation until just 59 years ago when the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a major air raid on the city, killing nearly 250 people. As with the attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, just eight weeks earlier, many lives would have been saved had officials been more alert. Twenty minutes before the planes reached the city, a Belgian missionary on Melville Island, ten miles off the north Australian coast, radioed sighting a Japanese fighter formation. Believing it to be a prank, Darwin officials ignored the alarm.

The missionary got his revenge. The first Australian prisoner of war was nabbed by a member of the priest’s Aborigine flock, Matthias Ulungura, who had been enjoying a Hollywood Western being played on a projection screen at the mission house when a Japanese fighter plane fell from the sky over his island home.

Following the parachute down, Matthias quietly slipped up behind the frightened flier, snatched the pilot’s pistol and shouted what he’d heard so many times in American cowboy films, “Stick ‘em up!”

Today, day-trippers who fly over to the Tiwi Aboriginal settlement on Melville Island can see Matthias’s grave with the plaque honouring his heroism, as well as the bent propeller belonging to the downed Japanese pilot.

Darwin would welcome another Asian invasion, this time in the form of affluent, free-spending tourists. Direct flights connect the city with Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo. Visitors from North America must fly to Darwin from Sydney, a long four hour flight south. As the capital of the Northern Territory, Darwin is a comfortable base from which to splendour of Kakadu National Park - location of the Crocodile Dundee films.

There are scores of comfortable hotels for all budgets, including a Beaufort and a Sheraton. For food lovers, Darwin’s restaurants are surprisingly good considering the small size of the population. For those curious about exotic dishes, there are kangaroo fillets grilled in red wine and peppercorns, crocodile steaks and water buffalo burgers.

Every Thursday night, a lively cooked-food market springs up at Darwin’s Mindil Beach, just opposite the city’s impressive 80 room MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. This is where Darwin’s young multi-cultural population meets to eat in the sultry tropical nights. The variety of Asian food is vast and includes everything from authentic Chiu Chow goose, and Malay satay, to Vietnamese beef noodle soup, Indian samosas, spicy Thai salads and sweet Indonesian curries.

With the stars of the great Southern Cross reflecting in the waters of the nearby Timor Sea, it’s a lovely location for a night time snack. Just don’t be tempted to put your toes in the water here. They might make a nice snack for the crocodiles.

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