Sunday Territorian, Darwin
04 May 2014
General News, page 10 - 1,903.00 cm²
Capital City Daily - circulation 18,182 (------S)
Copyright Agency licensed copy
(www.copyright.com.au)
ID 254422900
PAGE 1 of 5
back
Darwin’s
character
comes with
the Territory
Tess Lea ’s new book Darwin is sure to evoke
nostalgia in those who’ve lived here all their lives,
and make newcomers fall in love. It’s also bound to
ruffle some feathers. From Cyclone Tracy to salty
plums, the bombing of Darwin and the local
characters, her writing covers it all. In this extract
from the chapter titled Eating warm mangoes, the
Top End born and bred author looks at what it
takes to be considered a Darwinite.
IT is a debate that uses exclusion criteria as shifty as the town’s turbulent
demographics.
Contests over the title take place
every day, in every rebuttal in letters
and texts to the NT News, in every
protest about a tightening of rules
where before there were none.
Disconnecting drinking alcohol
from driving a vehicle, having speed
limits, or suggesting fireworks should
be illegal invoke the rallying cry: Go
back to where you came from! You’re
not a local!
For some, a Darwinite must have
been born in Darwin; for others, they
must have lived in the town before
Cyclone Tracy came and blew it away.
Growing up to the songs of garage
band The Swamp Jockeys might be a
marker, as could preferring Paul’s
Iced Coffee over other brands.
Perhaps it is being old enough to
have snuck into the Nightcliff Drivein, coiled like a carpet snake in someone’s boot. Or remembering the time
when people viewed the Beer Can Regatta as a clever re-use of the ugly
drinkers’ middens that use to line the
Stuart Highway, a unique heraldry to
announce the capital city.
Oftentimes, “Darwinite” veers
close in meaning to the term “Territorian”, a word adroitly wielded by the
long ascendant Country Liberal Party
as part of its divide-and-rule tactics.
As David Carment writes, Territorianism was “an aggressively presented
sense of identity that encompassed
full statehood and rapid economic development”. Criticism of Canberra
was an essential feature, as was dutiful
optimism about Darwin’s promise as
the gateway to trade with Asia. A Territorian was never Indigenous.
g
A Darwinite might not be someone who knows everyone, either. It is
easily possible for old-timers and visitors returning after a twenty-year absence to be foreigners to modern-day
Darwin.
When the veteran journalist Tony
Clifton returned to reassess Darwin’s
status as Australia’s last frontier town,
his verdict was negative. Darwin, he
lamented, was no longer a place of
hellraisers and pub brawls. It had become dull, “a white-bread, naturestripped, inward-looking, neat and
clean haven for southern white migrants, who labour mainly in the coalmines of the NT administration and
its sub-branches”.
Easy as it is to agree that the old
frontier Darwin has disappeared, it is
not quite true. There’s no shortage of
grizzled characters, eccentrics, beer
bellies and beards. Beneath the ven-
Sunday Territorian, Darwin
04 May 2014
General News, page 10 - 1,903.00 cm²
Capital City Daily - circulation 18,182 (------S)
Copyright Agency licensed copy
(www.copyright.com.au)
ID 254422900
PAGE 2 of 5
back
eer of de
development
elopment success stories lie
pockets of terrible poverty, homelessness, alcoholism, violence, and a dormant racism that, like the melioidosis
bacterium, sits a mere 10 centimetres
below the surface.
If anything, retailers say things are
getting worse, bewailing the drunken
fights choreographed outside their
businesses and the human faeces they
hose away each morning.
For Aboriginal visitors, Darwin has
changed too, for good and bad. Once,
you easily could come into town to
get sly grog, heading to the small,
tree-lined oasis known as One Mile
Dam and other fringe camps, easily
escaping public scrutiny.
“That’s where all the visitors went,
so many tribes,” my friends tell me.
“All dat family from Belyuen-Wadjigiyn, Kiyuk, all the tribes, long time
ago, they used to go there, get flagon.
Nobody hassled us in the old times. A
long time ago, you could drink outside. Now we just get hassle. We just
go there quick and come back.”
It is true, the place has changed.
New Darwin finds its centre in Palmerston, the satellite town that is fast
becoming the north’s demographic
centre, making the old peninsular
CBD but one node, kept alive by public sector administrations, a “golden
mile” of pubs and nightclubs on Mitchell Street and a fierce rental market
for serviced apartments.
The city is no longer red dust interspersed with hand-watered patches of
grass, but a more uniform green, courtesy of Australia’s highest water consumption rates. There are more cafes
and retail outlets, a convention centre, a wave pool, bike paths and, famously, assorted markets with their
southeast Asian foodstuffs and bohemian feel. Houses meet the boundaries of their yards with more affluent
conviction.
A greater number of enclosed
shopping malls and high-end retail
outlets stand ready to satisfy consumer cravings. There is even a nightclub,
Throb, celebrating cross-dressing and
multiple sexualities – a far cry from
the thrills and spills of Darwin’s
“prawn and porn” nights (they’ve had
to migrate further down the track).
ResideNT, an up-market magazine
issued by Throb’s owners, portrays
Darwin through the prism of local
celebrities, all gourmet tastes and
designer dazzle, so beautiful it is
almost unrecognisable.
Yet some things haven’t changed
much at all. Describing a contemporary version of Milesy’s old stomping
grounds, for young people Darwin
continues to have the attractions and
the downsides of a large country
town.
“You endure the heat, you get
drunk. If you stay, you can have a
baby and maybe get a home loan.
“It’s better to get out,” one young
man told me, briefly back home from
his studies “down south”. It can feel
suffocating.
Lisa, who self-identifies as “Eurasian”, gave a similar verdict. “It becomes very repetitive in Darwin after
a while,” she told me. “There’s a
strong culture of drinking and drugtaking. Everyone in Darwin’s smoked
weed or drunk crazy amounts of alcohol by age fifteen. It’s more accepted there, more expected.
“And for people who are reasonably intelligent, who are holding
down jobs, their duty is to save up for
a car or house or to start having their
kids, not to dream of another life of
creativity or adventure.
“Darwin makes you want to make
security and permanence your
priority.”
She paused, wanting to pinpoint
what it is that drives young people
out of Darwin or, if they stay, sorts
them into binge drinkers or sturdy
conservatives.
“There’s a bit of a struggle for Darwin people to define their own identity – it gets fixed for you.
“You’re a ‘tradie’, Lisa says, tagging the air with quote marks. “Or an
‘AJ’, a ‘Parmo-slut’, whatever. If you
want to escape it, you have to go
down south, and then you can have a
range of identities, no problem.”
AJs are ‘Army Jerks’ (though soldiers counterclaim it means Army
Jocks). I had learnt about them from
Donna, another Darwin-born girl
from the post-cyclone generation.
Donna never wants to leave. A
trained jillaroo, she competes in rodeos, rides the mechanical bull in
pubs to win free drinks and holds her
p
own if a fight is on. She likes to shoot
kangaroos, pigs and magpie geese
and camp rough on long fishing trips.
If anything, for Donna, Darwin
has changed too much, become far
too trendy. To find the type of blokey
bloke and sense of ‘old Darwin’ she
prefers, she heads to the bolted steelframe corrugated iron pubs south of
Darwin’s Berrimah Line.
“The clubs in town are too expensive,” she complains, “and they’re full
of AJs, all out for a root and boot. The
only part that’s fun about those army
boys is their pick-up lines and the
professions they make up to avoid
telling you they’re army.”
She laughs as she hurls her ute
around another corner, with me
wishing she’d change down a gear
and find the brake pedal.
The young women have mapped
out an entire sexual topography of
Darwin and its transient menfolk.
RAAF fellas are different, they tell
me. They’re after commitment. You
can find them at certain clubs. But if
you want quick sex with a buff AJ
boasting a neat haircut and a decent
apartment, you head to other clubs.
AJs earn good money and, commanded to “get in, get off, get out”,
will enjoy the drill.
I am jealous and proud and horrified, all at once. This is new Darwin,
with new sexual politics; and old Darwin, when teenagers had seedy trysts
at East Point, and cruised back and
forth between Shell 24 Hour at the
airport gates, the wharf and Uncle
Sam’s.
This is an extract from ‘Darwin’ by
Tess Lea. Published this month from
New South Publishing (UNSW Press).