First stop this morning is the Darwin Museum and Art Gallery ......well the museum at least; it seems that the art gallery bit is temporarily closed while they get it set up for a major exhibition.
The Museum includes a large section on Cyclone Tracy which hit Darwin on Christmas Eve in 1974. The residents didnt take warnings about Tracy all that seriously as theyd been warned about another cyclone a few weeks earlier which ended up more or less bypassing the town and not really affecting anyone. Tracy virtually wiped Darwin out. Seventy one people died, few buildings were left standing, and the damage bill was close to seven billion dollars in todays money. A lot of the buildings effectively exploded as they werent designed to withstand cyclone force winds. The town was largely evacuated while it was rebuilt. The rumour circulating when I lived here was that the government of the time was hoping that the majority of residents wouldnt return, but nearly all did. Displays include a sound booth reenacting the noises that locals had to endure while Tracy was passing through. Theres a warning outside it that this might be too much for anyone who was
here at the time. I remember from living here that anyone who experienced Tracy could cope with any amount of clamour from thunderstorms and torrential rain, but they got really spooked by any sort of wind noise.
We move through to a large section on the towns human history. It seems that until 1911 the Territory was administered by the South Australian State Government. The Crow Eaters left it largely neglected, and even Darwin, by far its largest settlement, had no town water, sewerage or electricity. It was a wild and very sparsely populated frontier. A Prime Minister of the time, Alfred Deakin, famously said that the Territory either had to be populated or handed over to a foreign power. Hmmm, I wonder how that might have turned out. Just as well we didnt hand it to the Chinese. Were worried enough about them invading us as it is without having them already here. Oops. Theres another black mark against me in Premier Xis little black book. Fortunately our Federal Government responded by taking over control from the South Australians.
time they were its second largest racial grouping after the aborigines. The Chinese were heavily discriminated against under the White Australia Policy; they werent allowed to work for the Public Service, and were forcibly rehoused to poor areas to keep them out of the centre of Darwin. Some were even forcibly deported - particularly the old and sick - and this was legal, unless theyd been here before 1901. Populating Darwin and the Territory in general continued to be very difficult. Most roads leading here were only tracks and impassable in the wet, and it was much easier for Darwin locals to get to Hong Kong or Singapore than to or from Sydney or Melbourne. The only realistic way of getting here overland from down south was by camel. Labour was in chronically short supply, so much so that at the outbreak of World War 1 a law was enacted making it illegal for Territorians to be conscripted (this was later revoked when the War got a bit more serious). The Territory only finally became self governing in 1978.
boat used by Vietnamese refugees to escape to Australia back in 1978 - it looks way too small to all that way. Its passengers and crew apparently had to pretend that they were going fishing in order to escape; fortunately they were with open arms by the locals when they finally arrived here in Darwin. Another craft, the Tujuan, hailed from Indonesia, and looks like a mini version of Noahs Ark. It was used to catch sharks, and when the price of shark fin skyrocketed in 1990 its skipper decided to venture into Australian waters in search of more of his increasingly scarce and valuable prey. The boat and its crew were eventually captured by the local authorities and the craft was subsequently donated to the Museum.
