Reflections on Darwin Past, from Darwin Present

After a long hard day escaping the 34ºC heat and 80% humidity by being cocooned in the air conditioning of DP's Darwin office, I deserved a relaxing evening by the bay at the Sailing Club, watching another typically majestic sunset across this Northern Australian city's large natural harbour. 

Today I had broken the back of my visit  to the Northern Territory's capital city, auditing the conformance of my younger colleagues to the Company's management system. Their keenness to impress a visitor from the 'big smoke' at work was only surpassed by their warm hospitality after hours, which was perhaps kindled by their relief at passing muster. 

As we sat casually nursing our drinks and looking west out over Fannie Bay, we noticed two cargo vessels moored on the outer harbour. When the larger of the two suddenly belched out an ugly cloud of smoke, perhaps associated with the engines being started up, few of us gave it a second thought. 

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Had we been more mindful of the local headlines, several days earlier, our thoughts might have turned to another Darwin day, exactly 75 years ago to the month, when more dramatic plumes of smoke erupted from many of the 27 allied ships then moored in the harbour, eight of which were sunk that day.

On the morning of 19 February 1942, mainland Australia's first foreign enemy attack (since European settlement) was carried out by 188 Japanese planes. This was the largest Japanese attack since Pearl Harbour, some two months previously. Over the next two years Australia was to lose between 900 and 1100 people, 77 aircraft and several ships, including the MV Barossa and Neptuna which both received direct hits during the Darwin air raid.

Compare the above opening scene of the bombing of the merchant vessels with my title photo of a calm, Darwin sunset, both taken from similar vantage points overlooking the harbour.

Later, but less severe, bombings were experienced across Northern Australia in the following months, and included Broome and Port Hedland  in Western Australia, Millingimbi and Katherine in NT, and Townsville in North Queensland.

In all there were 64 air raids on Darwin in 1942 and 1943, but the first on 19 February 1942 was by far the worst.  
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Let's return then to that lazy idyllic evening by the bay, at Darwin's Sailing Club, spent in the company of some of this isolated community's stalwart diehards and socialites, drinking a few glasses of ice cold Sauvignon Blanc and feasting on the feistiest of game fish, the glorious barramundi, highly prized by anglers all over Northern Australia and beyond. 

The evening joy was punctuated by the laughter of children playing down by the beach, looking for mud crabs, and later by a birthday lady being toasted by her large assembly of friends. The comparison, across 75 years, of the westerly seaward views, then and now, and the ultimate price paid by so many, so that we might enjoy our freedom and our Darwin sunsets, were lost on many Darwinians that evening, but "man's inhumanity to man" is still solemnly remembered when the 'Grim Reaper' casts his annual shadow of remembrance over our various communities.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.For the Fallen/Ode of Remembrance

Sources of War History and Photos

•  Air raids on Australia, 1942-43, Wikipedia  
• Air raids on Australian mainland - Second World War  
  
• The Japanese bombing of Darwin, Broome and Northern Australia  
  
• 75th Anniversary of the Bombing of Darwin Commemorative Number Plates 
  

Lead Photo - Sunset over the Bay  

by Ken Boddie (taken for the third floor of the Novotel on Darwin's Esplanade).

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When not researching the weird or the wonderful, the comical or the cultured, the sinful or the serious, I chase my creative side, the results of which can be seen as selected photographs of my travels on my website at:

http://ken-boddie.squarespace.com

The author of the above, Ken Boddie, besides being a sometime poet and occasional writer, is an enthusiastic photographer, rarely leisure-travelling without his Canon, and loves to interact with other like-minded people with diverse interests.

Ken's three day work week (part time commitment) as a consulting engineer allows him to follow his photography interests, and to plan trips to an ever increasing list of countries and places of scenic beauty and cultural diversity.