After three days at sea from Airlie Beach, we arrived at Darwin, capital of the Northern Territories, Australia’s most Northern town and its only Northern port. This is also known as ‘the top end of down under’. The town has a short and rather tragic history. The Northern Territories we’re nominally controlled by the Dutch from the 17th Century to the mid-19th, when the Dutch threw in the towel and ceded the Territories to South Australia. The Australian Government sent its Surveyor-General north to find a suitable location for a town. He established a town in the present location and called it Palmerston in 1869. However, the bay that the town was built on had been surveyed thirty years earlier by the HMS Beagle and they had named it after their naturalist, Charles Darwin. In 1911, the town was officially renamed, Darwin.
Subsequently, three major tragedies befell Darwin, each of which is documented in current day Darwin. The first was the openly racist policies of the Australian Government when they took control of the Northern Territories and its impact on the native Aboriginal Peoples and the Chinese who had been imported to the area for cheap labor. The second tragedy occurred during WWII. Due to its proximity to Japanese held territory, Darwin was the only Australian city to be bombed by the Japanese. The third tragedy was that the town was all but destroyed by a cyclone on Christmas Eve, 1974.
We arrived in Darwin on a hot overcast day. At 2 pm the QV Bridge recorded the temperature at 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Nonetheless we took the shuttle into town. Our first stop was a pharmacy. I had a bad cold and Frances was coming down with one also. After getting our cold remedies we headed to the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT.
