Darwin--an Aussie Shangri-La, sort of.

• Author: Baker, Robert
• Position: Travel narrative

I got more and more lonely as I drove North before dawn from my tiny motel to avoid the blazing desert heat. I was half way between Cairns in Northern Queensland and Darwin, capital of The Northern Territory. Both were very distant from the centers of most Aussie life. After hours of no other car on the road I drove through endless gray/green , low scrub. Then the road began to pass through rolling jungle and palms. That meant I was nearing the Timor Sea and Darwin.

It was a man's town, where some men dodging the law, or going for adventure, fast money or just stranded, wound up at the far end of Australia. It was so far from Sydney, it felt like Moon Base One. As a U.S. Consular official based in Sydney, I was making my first visit to a huge part of my territory. Among other things, I was responsible for public relations for American ships visiting Australia, including their many calls at the port of Darwin. I had rented a car to get a feel for this part of my territory.

Just after dawn as I drove on that Sunday morning, the deserted, patchy, narrow road became a smooth blacktop, double lane road. It marked the far edge of Darwin. Suddenly, there was a wide grass divider planted with palm trees. I was glad to be nearing the heart of town. Then I noticed in the dim early light, lying on the grass divider strip, hundreds of motionless bodies, mostly black, but many white. They wore T- shirts and shorts, and mostly had bare feet.

I was astonished and wondered if some disaster had suddenly hit the place, but then I looked more closely. I saw glinting light around the bodies. Empty beer bottles glittered all around the bodies on the grass. This was largest and most profound "morning after" I have ever seen. Nobody was standing or even twitching. The drunks on the grass went on for about a mile, a tropical Drunkarama. Australia's multi-cultural society sure was there in a vast communal hangover. In town on the sidewalks, the bodies thinned out a lot, just a few lying on the pavement here and there.

Like Shangri-La, Darwin was far away and gave temporary eternal life to its devotees through cases of Fosters beer. The passed out blacks I saw were Aborigines, whose numbers were severely reduced by smallpox long before whites arrived. That was introduced up north by visiting Indonesian fishers and traders. Today Aborigines are just one percent of Australia's twenty million people and are ravaged by alcoholism and family dissolution. The government pays Aborigines the same dole given to whites. It has begun to control some of that dole money to purchase for the recipients food and other necessities. Their complex family and religious lives and many languages and arts have been to a great degree lost. The same kind of disaster hit...