two days in darwin

Darwin bore the heavy burden of high expectations after two failed attempts to enjoy the Great Barrier Reef. The whole Australia experience was at stake.

That is a lot of weight to pile on a town with very little history. Its European narrative began in 1838 when the HMS Beagle anchored in its harbor. The captain named the prospective port Darwin in honor of the Beagle's recent passenger -- the British naturalist, Charles Darwin.

The town is now home to about 150,000 and is the capital of Australia's Northern Territory. It is closer to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, than to the Australian capital, Canberra. Think Anchorage in 1955. But with palm trees, heat, and humidity.

Darwin is defined by tragedy, and the population wears the survivor badge proudly. The place was leveled by a cyclone in 1897, when it was not very large, and by another cyclone in 1937.

The residents rebuilt after the 1937 cyclone only to have much of the town leveled in 1942 by the same 188-plane Japanese air fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor. In response, the citizens secretly built tunnels in the escarpment the town rests upon. As luck has it with such bureaucratic projects, the tunnels were completed just as Japan surrendered. That should be a cautionary tale for people enamored of economy-boosting infrastructure projects.

But that was not the end of Darwin's tales of woe. On Christmas Day 1974, a cyclone named Tracy, with 135-mile-per-hour winds, leveled 70% of the town's buildings -- including some colonial stone buildings that had survived the earlier attacks on Darwin.

If you are searching for charming colonial buildings from the Victorian era, you will not find them in Darwin. There are some remnants. But most of Darwin's architecture reflects the nature of the place -- a young outer-looking port.

Of course, there are the odd pieces that look as if they are essentially fortresses. Like this church.

I have seen similar churches in Yucatan. But they were designed to be Spanish defense works during uprisings. This church is a fortress designed to defeat cyclones. Form follows function.

I long ago discovered the best way to get a feel for a new place when time is limited is to walk its streets. That is what I did in Darwin.

Last week's edition of The Economist reviewed Erling Kagge's Walking: One Step at a Time, a pedestrian paen. The reviewer passed along this gem, and I am now sharing it with you.

"He who walks lives longer," he writes, "but that is only half the truth." The other half is that the art of walking also slows down time, and forces you to consider your surroundings. "The mountain up ahead, which slowly changes as you draw closer, feels like an intimate friend by the time you've arrived." Walking, in other words, prolongs the experience of life, as well as life itself.

And so it did. I walked through the streets to one of the post-Tracy creations of Darwin. The George Brown Darwin Botanic Gardens.

There has been a garden on the site for decades. But it was almost stripped clean in 1974. In 45 years, the plants have recovered nicely. After all, this is the tropics.

The place is nice. Not one of the best gardens I have visited. But it has that slightly-cluttered and comfortable feel of a British garden -- like a pair of old slippers.

Along with the obvious surrealistic streaks that tropical plants add to any garden. You can almost imagine Salvador Dali's rhinoceros wandering by.

And just a little further south, you can be entertained with the antics of wallabies -- those whimsical pint-sized cousins to the kangaroo.

For those of you who quailed when I started this essay with "its European narrative began in 1838," I know exactly how you feel.

History in this corner of Australia did not begin in 1838. People began arriving here 40,000 years ago. When the Dutch and British arrived, the Larrakia clan occupied 1500 square miles of the land around Darwin.

I came to Darwin in search of the art of these sea-faring, trading people. And I was pleased with what I found.

The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory is one of those parochial repositories of local natural history that features venomous snakes, lethal spiders, and stinging corals. But not everything is an advertisement of death in Australia.

The museum has produced an exhibit entitled "Between the Music and the Stars" that showcases contemporary aboriginal art in conjunction with a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. That may sound a bit odd until you recall the mystical (and fanciful) connection between John Glenn's Friendship 7 "sparks" and the aboriginal bonfires in The Right Stuff.

Like all Australian aboriginal tribes, the Larrakia rely heavily on astronomical sightings for both their culture and their art. To them, that "and" is redundant. Their art is their culture; their culture is their art.

All of the aboriginal pieces in the exhibit reflect the sky myths passed down by elder men in specific or related clans to the next generation of men. In this exhibit, the myths revolve around the dream myths that explain the creation of the lights in the night sky.

These morning star poles represent the movement of Banumbirr, the Galpu clan name for Venus. 

Like all aboriginal art, the poles are part of a cultural ceremony. These poles are used as part of a mourning rite that starts at dusk and continues until morning with the rising of the Morning Star. The star acts as a guide for the dead to the spirit world. Dante and Virgil in the desert.

There was also sculpture. Most aboriginal art is intricately decorated with symbols. You can see the detail in this figure of a moon man.

The moon holds a special place in aboriginal mythology. The full moon is a reminder to all Gija people to respect the rule of right-way marriage.

Garnkiny did not follow the rule. He fell in love with his mother-in-law, an almost-universal taboo. Despite his protest of Edwardian "woman-he-loved," his village exiled him. He climbed a hill and became the moon.

He then cursed the villagers to death. Without that curse, the clan believes its members would have all been resurrected within three days of their physical death.

The painting, showing Garnkiny transforming himself from human form into the moon, adopts the style of merging European abstract expressionism with aboriginal symbols.

This detail also demonstrates how aboriginal dot paintings can incorporate blendings that are almost pointilism.

These two pieces reflect the same myth -- but with notable variations in the tale. A painting that looks almost Polynesian in its complex form.

And a sculpture that blends surrealism with native forms.

These works have created controversies amongst anthropologists, art critics, and the aboriginal clans -- on several levels.

The first is traditional. A large share of contemporary aboriginal artists are women. Traditionally, only men could learn the secret language of the symbols. The fact that women are divulging what were once clan secrets has raised cultural appropriation issues -- that is, if people within the same culture can appropriate their own culture. I will leave that argument for others.

The second level of criticism is the medium of choice for contemporary artists. A large portion of the women artists have adopted European-style canvases and art forms. The line between surrealism and abstract expressionism, and traditional aboriginal symbols is very thin. Picasso's reliance on African symbols during his cubist period is an example how cultures can share forms.

This criticism strikes me as being a bit hollow. The contemporary artists do not masquerade as traditionalists. Their art is to take the traditional and use it within another medium. Just as the "Between the Music and the Stars" exhibit successfully melds aboriginal art into a celebration for humanity of the moon landing.

Our two days in Darwin turned out to be a satisfactory make-up for our days not spent on the Great Barrier Reef. And I have a much better feel for aboriginal art having shared part of a day with Nancy among these amazing pieces.

Tomorrow morning we are in Singapore for two days before flying off to our group's respective NAFTA nests.