Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
thirds of the city's residents were evacuated, 45,000 in all, the largest mass evacuation in
Australia's history. In the aftermath of Terry, government funds built a new city of striking
modernity.
As the rebuilt and modern capital of The Top End (The Northern Territory), Darwin
has a performing arts center, an art gallery (Aboriginal Art) and a flower festival (Bougain-
villea), all in sharp contrast to the Northern Territory's frontier spirit and sparse population.
Whites mostly live in urban places and Aborigines in rural areas. In the outback, recreation
is chiefly bushwalking and exploring in vehicles with four-wheel drive. Bathing in rivers
and streams is strongly discouraged. Posted signs and local advice warn against saltwater
crocodiles.
Darwin is named for Charles Darwin, whose connection with the city is secondhand.
His former ship, the Beagle, explored the area in 1839, and the Darwin name was affixed
in 1911. Two other names associated with the Northern Territory tell a livelier story. Rum
Jungle is a town about sixty miles south of Darwin, and the name supposedly dates to the
gold strikes of the 1870s and the “health insurance” imbibed by miners living in tropical
sweat. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bugis sailors searched the coast for a
Chinese delicacy, sea cucumbers. Their cutthroat stealth remains fixed in the memory of
English-speaking children to this day. For it is Bugis who gave us the terrifying admoni-
tion, “Be careful or the boogeyman will get you!”
Cairns has a population of about 151,000. Pinch your nostrils and the name comes out
almost right: Cans. Cairns once prospered on the sugar industry. Today it prospers on the
tourist trade, catering to those keen on deep-sea fishing and exploring the Great Barrier
Reef. The latter is the largest coral structure on the planet, stretching for more than about
1,200 miles off the continental coast, with about 350 species of coral, some gorgeously
colored, spread across 124,275 miles and 700 islands. “Living polyps extract calcium car-
bonate from the sea water and so form the coral structure around their bodies.” [261] When
the coral dies it bleaches white. More than a thousand species of fish swim and dart through
the reef.
The reef almost finished off the great Captain Cook. In 1770 Cook sailed west from
New Zealand and discovered the Australian coast. On April 20, his ship, The Endeavor,
landed at Botany Bay, five miles to the south of what is now Sydney. Even in its day, The
Endeavor was not a large ship: ninety-seven feet overall, twenty-nine feet, three inches
beam. Sailing north, the ship entered the labyrinth of the reef, and on June 10, disaster
struck. The Endeavor hit jagged coral, which sawed open her hull. Small boats put an-
chors into the reef, and using windlass and ropes, sailors winched the ship into water with
a hole in her hull. Cook resorted to a risky maneuver; the hole was plugged by fother-
ing—plugging the leak by draping the hull with a canvass sail reinforced at the end with
yarn and oakum.
 
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