Darwin, the city
by A. Snelling
Even the Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao knew about this city located on the
hot, isolated northern coastline of the Australian continent. He asked a visiting
Australian Prime Minister if it was named after Charles Darwin, and it was. But
the history of this city is sometimes as complex and as tragic as Darwin’s
theory of evolution itself.
The area was discovered in 1839 and mapped by Lieutenant John Lort Stokes. It was
named Port Darwin by Stokes after his naturalist friend Charles, with whom he had
sailed on the Beagle between 1831 and 1836. However, early attempts at settlement
were not encouraging and were all but abandoned by 1849.
Despite these failures. a government surveyor, George Goyder, prepared a plan for
a permanent settlement on the shores of Port Darwin in 1869. However, when the first
God-fearing settlers arrived at the location, they refused to honour the man who
made the monkey’s uncle more serious than a joke. They would not call it Darwin.
Instead it was named Palmerston after a Christian gentleman who recently had been
Prime Minister of England. This name was to be commonly used until the death of
Queen Victoria in 1901. Then, on March 18, 1911, Palmerston was officially renamed
Darwin by the Governor General, the Earl of Dudley.
In its first 143 years of history, the area has had many notable firsts. In 1872
it became the first town through which Australia could communicate by Telegraph
with the rest of the world. It was joined to London via the submarine cable from
Java. In 1934, the airport was the ‘doorway’ for the first regular air
service between Australia and England. At 9.59 am, February 19, 1942, Darwin became
the first and only Australian city to suffer enemy air attack when 188 Japanese
planes bombed and strafed ships, buildings, and military installations. By the end
of the day the destroyer USS Peary had sunk Only 25 of her crew were still alive.
Seven other ships lay on the bottom of the harbour and the aerodrome was wiped out.
In the following months another 63 raids added to the immense initial damage.
After the war the first major commercial pitchblende (uranium ore) discovery in
Australia was made near Darwin at Rum Jungle, in 1949. Ten years later, in the year
of the centenary of the publication of the ‘Origin of the Species’,
Darwin was proclaimed a city; a city which had Australia’s only hospital solely
concerned with the treatment of leprosy and a place which Charles Darwin never visited
in his life, even though the first ship to sail in its harbour was none other than
the H.M.S. Beagle.
Darwin is also Australia’s most cyclone ravaged city. While it has been blown
about by many cyclones, its famous tragedy came as a Christmas present from Cyclone
Tracy in the early hours of December 25, 1974. Two and a half hours later 50 people
were known dead and 16 were missing. Much of the town lay flat on the ground in
a $500 million rubbish heap. The cyclone passed through and destroyed all the military
and communications installations which gave the whole thing a sinister aura. People
soon began to speculate that some enemy was practicing at weather warfare. Some
25,000 people were to be evacuated from the city. It was to be 4½ years before
the population numbers returned to normal.
The population at Darwin has one other claim to fame. Its alcohol consumption is
probably the highest in the world. On New Years eve 1974, a week after ‘Tracy’,
Major General Stretton, in charge of the evacuation, ordered dry celebrations only,
but the tide of liquor was irresistible, the cry was ‘roll out the barrel’.
On Christmas Day it had been even worse. At the ‘Buffs’ Club kegs had
been stored in the meatworks, and at 11 am as usual, the club opened with the boast,
‘in spite of the cyclone, we didn’t miss a beat’!
During the 1980/81 statistical year the 128,000 people in the Northern Territory,
of which Darwin is the capital, consumed almost 25 million litres of beer, over
2 million litres of wine and over 5 million litres of spirits. Thus the apparent
annual consumption for every man, woman and child was 194.6 litres of beer, 16.3
litres of wine and 4.6 litres of spirits, a factor which secured them a place in
the Guinness Book of Records. Taking into account the number of children in the
population (of which there are many thousands) plus the teetotallers, plus the fact
that consumption is much higher in Darwin than the rest of the N.T., then many people
in Darwin probably drink over 300 litres of beer yearly, or the alcohol equivalent.
No wonder some have suggested ‘Tracy’ was intended to ‘wake up’
a drunken community and to warn a decadent, godless Australia. Ironic that the city
involved was named after Charles Darwin, the man whose work on evolution has been
a singularly significant cause of such godlessness.
Acknowledgements
- ‘Cyclone! Christmas in Darwin 1974’ Sydney Morning Herald Publication.
- N.T. Drug and Alcohol Bureau, Darwin.
- N.T. Information Centre, Darwin.
- ‘N.T. News’, 19th February, 1982.
- ‘N.T. News’, April 24,1982.
- ‘Up the Track’, by Douglas Lockwood.
- Encyclopedia Britannica
- ‘Hervey Bay Chronicle’, April 26,1982.
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