Darwinian memories following yesterday's gun attack there
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The first thing that hits you in Darwin is the heat. When I arrived there years ago my flight landed at 11pm and, even at that hour, the difference between the air-conditioned airplane cabin and the heat and humidity outside was striking. It was like opening the door of an oven that had only recently been turned off and was now slowly cooling. My cousin, who greeted me at the airport when I arrived, had been living there for while and just grinned when I asked if such weather conditions were normal.
On the way to his house in the suburbs the “fire danger” warning signs that I regularly saw (ranging from “low-moderate” to “red alert”) seemed strange to me, until I realised after a minute or two just how lethal any kind of uncontrolled fire could be. The distances to other towns was also a novelty as some signs mentioned distances of over 1,000km (Darwin to Alice Springs alone is c 1500km). Like Father Dougal looking at an alarm clock at 5 in the morning, I was shocked to be involved with such figures.
The strangeness only increased the longer I stayed there. A few nights later I was alone in my cousin's house for the first time when a locust somehow got into the kitchen. Later on I'd have stressful encounters with angry looking snakes and spiders but the locust was perhaps the most disconcerting experience: up close its speed and size and the loud noises it made all genuinely terrified me.
I soon got a job in a pub nearby and quickly began to wonder if I hadn't actually wandered onto the set of a Crocodile Dundee film. The clientele was a mixture of local regulars (a lot of whom were English and Irish immigrants who'd left their birth countries many many years ago) and construction and mine workers returning on leave from major projects in land. One regular enthused about how his dog had killed a python while others didn't seem to share my anxiety about an encounter I'd had with a Death Adder while on a camping trip.
The locals' mockery of my mortal terror aside, it's clear to me years later that my brief period spent working and living there was one of the most interesting times of my life. I found the natural world alien in a way that I still struggle to fully explain to others and I've never found people who managed to give off such a strong sense of gruff, unpretentious friendliness in the same way that the locals did. I might be wrong but I always got the sense that the two were deeply entwined; that the occasional hostility of the natural world bred a strong sense of community amongst the locals. A mass shooting may cause great damage in a world where working together as neighbours counts for so much.