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

Katherine NT - 24 to 30 August 2009

We stopped at Katherine, named [and misspelled] by John McDouall Stuart after Catherine Chambers, the daughter of South Australian pastoralist James Chambers, who had supported Stuart's expedition.

Katherine Gorge is not far from the town and a if you take the three gorge tour it includes a swim which you can enjoy as long as you make sure the freshwater crocodiles are in the pool above you.




Katherine has a nice musuem, with a good exhibit on the Overland Telegraph and exhibits of life in the outback.

John was troubled to see his mother's Lightburn washing machine as an exhibit. It was built by a cement mixer company which explains the shape.


We loved the early advertising for a brand of meat, which went "Many a man thinks it is his goodness that keeps him from crime when it is only it his full stomach - On half allowance he would be as ugly a knave as anyone. Never mistake "Collins' Beef" for good principles."

We also swam at Edith Falls at sunset. Trish described it as like swimming in liquid gold.


We saw Springvale Station, established in 1879 by Alfred Giles, one of the first two stations in the area. We enjoyed a drover's dinner at the museum.

Alice Springs 11-17 & 22 -23 August 2009

Alice Springs is a good stopover. We serviced the car and the van's brakes and wheel bearings.

We also cleaned the car and van and were pleasantly surprised by how little dust entered the van.

Then we were free to enjoy the town. We liked the MacDonnell Ranges Camping Park which had excellent activities scheduled most evenings, including a very knowledgeable NT Parks Ranger.

We enjoyed the cafes and bookshops and purchased rather a lot of books.

We visited the AIM Hospital designed by John Flynn to act as a large evaporative air conditioner. Hot air was drawn in through the basement and passed through wet sackcloth which cooled it and filtered dust.

It was then drawn up through the wards and vented through the ceiling.

Attached to the Hospital was the shed where the first pedal radio transmissions occurred.


The pedal radio, developed by Alfred Traeger in 1929, solved the problem of communication in the outback. The pedal mechanism powered the radio and as a side benefit gave outback ladies great figures and a social life through what were called the Galah sessions.

Having followed the route of the Ghan from Port Augusta, Alice Springs was the last last stop. As the sign on the poster said "Just getting to Alice was an experience." A copy of the Alice Springs Station has been built as a museum for the Ghan.

Adjoining the Ghan museum is the National Transport Hall of Fame.

It is an amazing collection of trucks and memorabilia. Their brief is unusual in that they don't restore all of them to factory perfect but leave modifications in place to show how the trucks were used. The trucks are registered and can be driven. They have a lot of one off trucks such as an experimental hybrid Hino and a Rotinoff Road Train that Vesteys [Lord Vestey was the second largest owner of Stations after the Kidmans] had built as they didn't want to use American trucks.

WWII revolutionized trucking in Australia as Army surplus trucks were sold off and trained drivers returned from overseas.

This was the end of the road for the Afghan Cameleers. When the camels were no longer needed they were let loose in the desert. The Cameleers and their camels are viewed with a lot of respect and affection here for the part they played in opening up the outback. This is possibly the only place in the world where you can buy an Afghan biscuit (cookie).

Inside the Transport Hall of Fame is the Kenworth Dealers Hall of Fame, which includes one of every Kenworth model sold in Australia. Tricia used to drive past the Kenworth Factory daily and often saw the heads going out, all painted up, for their final test run. She enjoyed this very much and consequently it was a big thrill for her to see this museum. They have the first truck delivered from Bayswater.


We saw the Pioneer Womens Museum which is also the old Gaol. John questioned why this was the venue, and apparently it is still a hot topic with some of the supporters, but it saved the gaol from demoliton and they do have a lot of space for expansion. As well as pioneer women they commemorate women who were the first in their field.


We saw the School of the Air. Originally remote and isolated children were educated by Correspondence School, however it was noted that they often lacked socialization skills. In 1944 Adelaide Miethke thought that the Flying Doctor Radio could be used to reach children learning by correspondence and give them a wider range of experiences. This was trialled and has evolved into the modern School of the Air, which uses computers to provide the children with classroom experience. At 1,300,000 square kilometres it is the world's largest classroom, and it is fascinating to watch videos of the class in progress. www.assoa.nt.edu.au
There is also a good description in Wikipedia.

Alice Springs is also the site of John Flynn's Grave.

John Flynn's first parish was at the tiny Smith of Dunesk Mission at Beltana, [See our previous posting on Beltana]. At Beltana, he saw at first hand the difficulties of Outback life. He was commissioned to prepare a report on life in the Northern Territory, to be presented to the Presbyterian Church in 1912. The General Assembly acted upon Flynn's recommendations and appointed him the head of a new organisation, the Australian Inland Mission (AIM).

 

Flynn's ideas and hard work were responsible for alleviating much of the isolation that makes the outback such a challenging place to settle. The outback was a frontier through to the 1950's It can be romanticized, but it was a place of great loneliness where people suffered and died unnecessarily. Human contact and medical care helped to make life on vast Stations such as Anna Creek possible. Flynn's work provided a mantle of safety for outback people through medicine, aviation, pedal radio and visiting padres.

During our travels we have been following the Cameleers, the Old Ghan, John Flynn and the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Alice Springs marks an end point in that journey. The Overland Telegraph continues to Darwin.

Sunday we visited the West Macdonnell Ranges,

seeing Standley Chasm, Ellery Creek Bighole,

















the Serpentine Gorge,The Ochre Pits,

















Ormiston Gorge and Glen Helen Gorge. Our final day we saw The Residency which was built during Central Australia's brief period of legislative independence and remained a social hub in Alice Springs and The Old Stuart Town Gaol.

We enjoyed a final coffee and wander up the Todd Mall.

Stuart Highway - 24 to 26 August 2009

We travelled north on the Stuart Highway, following the route of the tough Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart who blazed the way for the Overland Telegraph. This Highway is has many significant sites commemorating the history of Stuart, the Telegraph and World War II.

Just north of Alice Springs we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn - so now it is official - we have gone "Troppo"

The Stuart Highway was a dirt track until WW2 when the need to move troops and goods back and forth from Alice Springs where the Ghan terminated meant the track deteriorated badly under constant traffic and the road was bitumenised. All the States Public works departments were assigned a section.




Shortly after we stopped to move a dead Kangaroo further from the road to help protect the Wedge Tail Eagles which are killed in increasing numbers as they rise into the path of cars after feeding on the carcass.







We stopped for coffee at the Aileron station roadhouse and admired the aboriginal art and the huge [12 meters high] sculptures of the Anmatjere man, woman and child and Hollywood style sign erected by the Alice Springs sculptor Mark Egan.

We then passed the marker for Central Mount Stuart which Stuart calculated as the point equidistant from North, South, East and West coasts and thus in his view the centre of Australia.



At Barrow Creek there is a well preserved Overland Telegraph repeater station. It gives a sense of the isolation and scale of undertaking to construct the line in the space of two years less than ten years after the country was first explored. It was an amazing technological feat to connect Australia to the rest of the world in that era and through that rugged country.


Our overnight stop was at Wycliffe Wells the unofficial UFO Capital of Australia. Unfortunately no luck in seeing a flying saucer. However we drove to watch the sunset at the Devils Marbles which was wonderful.





From Wycliffe Wells we drove to Tennant Creek, a town which arose from a 1930's gold rush. At Tennant Creek we saw the Battery Hill Mine and the Old Telegraph Office.


There is a great social history display which shows how hard it was to be a miner and miners family in such a remote mining town where initially the water had to be shipped in 44 gallon drums.

Outside Tennant Creek we came to the Three Ways, the intersection of the Stuart and Barkly Highways and the site of another memorial to the Rev John Flynn.

We then detoured to Newcastle Waters, the junction of the North South Murranji and East West Barkly stock routes from the days when drovers moved cattle to the seaboard markets. It had a Stockman's Memorial and the Junction Hotel built for "free" by a group of the hoteliers creditors out of disused windmills on stock bores.


There is also an AIM Church built from a Sydney Williams Hut or Comet hut. These were used to house the troops during WW2
From there we drove to Daly Waters. This has an historic pub and serves a great Barra and Beef Barbecue.

It has Australia's most remote traffic light - always red and always ignored, but fortunately no sign of Australia's most remote traffic policeman.Daly Waters is also the site of Australia's first International Airport and the hangars and terminal remain. It is also the site of what remains of an "S" carved by Stuart on a tree nearby, almost impossible to see and impossible to photograph.





From Daly Waters we drove to Katherine, stopping for lunch at Mataranka to see the "Big Termite" mound and swim at the Mataranka Springs [created by soldiers in WWII without the need for an Environmental Impact Statement] and then at the naturally occurring Bitter Springs.


Bitter Springs is in Elsey National Park.

Mataranka is where the Elsey Homestead was located. Mrs. Aeneas Gunn wrote ' We of the Never Never' and 'Little Black Princess' about her experiences here.
Never never means never never go there or never never leave depending on your point of view.