Darwin 31st August - 7th September 2009

From Katherine we went to Darwin via Adelaide River.

Adelaide River is a convenient lunch stop on the road to Darwin and as there was a museum we naturally popped in.

The only other visitors were waiting for the wife's cousin, the driver of the southbound Ghan freight train, to pass through in "the next half hour". We waited also, and waited and waited as in traditional form it was late. But come it did and we did get a wave from the driver!!

Adelaide River was the headquarters for US and Australian Military Operations after the bombing of Darwin. There were camps, hospitals and army farms for the thousands of men quartered there.

Men lived in Sydney Williams "Comet" Huts, named after Sydney Williams who designed them as a flat pack to be easily transported and erected, and the Comet company a well known wind mill manufacturer.

After the war all the infrastructure was sold off as army surplus and so there are very few artifacts left. Of the many huge military bases that existed along the highway to Darwin all there is now is the tarmac of old airstrips.



The Overland Telegraph passed by Adelaide River and the museum informed us that the Oppenheimer poles were manufactured by Oppenheimer in Germany, and a fine job they did. Even 130 years later there is no rust on any of them after being exposed in the harshest conditions all that time.

From Adelaide River we drove into Darwin. In September 1839 the HMS Beagle sailed into the Harbour during its 3rd Voyage. John Stokes named the Harbour Port Darwin as a tribute to Darwin, their old shipmate.

Attempts to settle the area failed miserably until in 1869 the town of Palmerston was established. This would probably have failed too if the Overland Telegraph line hadn't connected to the line from Java at this point. In 1911 Palmerston changed its name to Darwin. Darwin is climate challenged and isolated even today. It has 3 seasons The Dry, the Buildup and the Wet.

Darwin's development accelerated with WW2. The Northern Territory was under military command and infrastructure was developed to service the War in the Pacific. In 1974 Darwin was almost completely destroyed by cyclone Tracy. Rebuilding has left a truly modern city built to a higher cyclone standard.

Our first night was dinner at Crustaceans on Stokes Wharf.

We had work to do here. Tricia cleaned the caravan from top to bottom while John realigned the caravan's independent suspension.

The next day we visited the Mindil Market and dipped our toes in the Arafura Sea, we had finally made it from coast to coast.

We watched the first of many sunsets and visited many good restaurants. Saturday at 3:15 pm we bought our first papers that were actually published on that day, a change from the one day and two day old papers we were used to on the track. The cost of the Melbourne "Age", seven dollars. Isolation is not cheap.

It was absolute bliss to go to a cafe and read all the papers over an iced coffee.



Darwin is Australia's front line military town, and the F18's and US F15's roar out of the airbase regularly, producing what we have called in the USA " the Sound of Freedom". With that as background noise we visited the Heritage Air Museum where one of the volunteers gave a fascinating and continuously interesting two hour talk on the B52 bomber, one of the seminal symbols of the cold war.

He had details right down to the survival rates for different crew ejecting from the plane [do not be a rear gunner - even when in later models moved to the belly of the aircraft and at last given an ejection seat you were collected by the pilot's canopy if you ejected simultaneously]. When the B52 was tasked for low level flying - below 500 feet - much of their training was done in the Northern Territory, hence the permanent loan of this B52G model, one of the few not destroyed as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union. The B52H model is scheduled to fly until 2045, a service life of almost 90 years!!

Our Friday night movie was at the Deck Chair Cinema, an outdoor tradition. Homemade meals are available to buy. Friday is Timorese Food.


We went to the Military Museum at East Point. East Point is a lovely place for a picnic and has a safe salt water lake for swimming in. There are no crocodiles in there.


We visited Parap Market another one of the Asian Hawker Markets and saw over Parliament House.

Parliament house is built over the site of the Overland Telegraph office which was badly bombed during the raids on Darwin.

The telegraph technology was obsolete by then but the line was used for telephones and all ten of the post office staff who had volunteered to stay and operate the vital communication link were killed by a direct hit.

We had not realized that the first raid on Darwin, of over 64 raids during the course of the war, dropped more bombs than were used at Pearl Harbour. The only modern fighters based in Darwin were 11 Kittyhawks from the US Army Air Force's 33rd Pursuit Squadron, and most were destroyed on that first day, shot down by the more numerous Mitsubishi Type Zeros. 243 people were killed and 8 vessels in the harbour were sunk. Many of those vessels had escaped the Japanese after the fall of Singapore.

Government House a fine example of colonial architecture survived both the bombing and Cyclone Tracy.




Our our last day in Darwin we took the Turtle Tracks tour traveling on the Snubfin to Bare Sand Island which is a classic Castaway Island. It has one tree. Our route is shown on the map at right.
















Turtles come here to lay their eggs from April to November.

























In the first photo you can see the Turtle carefully mounding sand over the nest of eggs she has scooped in the sand. She then covers the whole area with sand, energetically spraying it with her front flippers.


The whole process is a big effort for her and she had to rest often on her way to the sea.

As it was late in the season we saw a hatch-ling make its way down to the sea. Such a long way for a creature less than four inches long, even our footprints were hard for it to climb.


It was a magic night. We even had the first storm of the year complete with lightning show.
Mangrove Route Ecotours