Survivors’ Lookout & Govt House

After our tour of the oil tunnels we walked up to the nearby Survivors’ Lookout.  This is where survivors of the 1942 bombing of Darwin gathered to survey the damage in the harbour.

The view of the Darwin harbour is mostly obscured by trees now.

After Japan’s entry into the war Darwin began evacuating citizens, by the time of the bombing most of the women, children, aged, and infirmed had left the city.

According to the signs, the day of the bombing there were 46 ships in the harbour.  Eight were sunk.

Further up the road was a monument with more information about the bombing.

It shows 292 fatalities in Darwin that day, but I’ve seen several different numbers (usually lower) and it seems as though it isn’t certain.

Also nearby is the Government House, where the Administrator of the Northern Territory lives. (Territories have an Administrator rather than a Governor, and a Chief Minister rather than a Premier.)  Once a year they open the building up for public tours, wouldn’t it be lovely to see inside?  The gardens are beautiful.

This lovely coat of arms for the NT was on the gate.  Those are red kangaroos, the largest living marsupial, on the sides and a wedge-tailed eagle at the top.  Both, as you can probably guess, are emblems of the Northern Territory.

We  have seen these frangipani trees all over the place up north.  Such a symbol of the tropics with their beautiful white flowers.  The kids love collecting them but they turn brown right away.

On the way back we took the walkway over the road to get a view of the Darwin waterfront.  Our car is parked down there under one of the trees, the entrance to the tunnels is on the right of this road.

In this building there are a few shops and eateries.  There’s a free ocean water swimming lagoon behind all those trees.  If you follow the path to to the left you’ll get to the wave pool.  We made sure to visit both during our stay in Darwin, the wave pool was especially fun and one of the highlights of our stay.

We drove by nearby Parliament House but opted not to stop in for a tour.  If it was just us adults we’d probably stop in to more of these places, but we visited parliament in Canberra and that was enough for the kids for a long time to come.  Maybe Perth.  ;)

WW2 Oil Storage Tunnels

After Kakadu we went to Darwin where we ended up staying for nearly two weeks.  We loved Darwin, even in October!  One of the first attractions we visited were the World War II Oil Storage Tunnels.  Darwin was bombed in 1942 during World War II.  There were more bombs dropped on Darwin that day than at Pearl Harbour months before.  Seven of the eleven above ground fuel storage tanks were destroyed during the initial and subsequent bombings.  They decided to create secret, hidden underground tunnels to hold the oil and fuel needed for their aircraft and ships.  Two of the tunnels are now open for tours, one you can only view but one you can walk the entire length of the tunnel.

These large pipes in the entrance tunnel are ventilation shafts to evacuate fumes from the fuel.

At the end of the entrance tunnel we found this cute junk man.  He was quite tall.  There were levers you could pull to make him move around a bit.  Next to him was the window into Tunnel 6.

According to the sign Tunnel 6 is 77 metres long.  We couldn’t go inside this one, only admire it through the viewing window.

These two tunnels were the only commercially used tunnels, used to store kerosene for aviation fuel in the 1950s.  But this tunnel imploded after heavy rains in 1955 and was decommissioned.  See all the water seepage?

We moved on to Tunnel 5 which is 172 metres long so more than double the length of the other one.

All down the length of this tunnel there are signs with information about the tunnels, the war, and life in the Top End at the time of the bombing.  The signs are new and are really well done.  The ruts going down the floor in the middle of the tunnel are to collect water seepage.  The tunnel was all stainless steel lined but the tunnels went without maintenance for thirty years and the floor of the tunnel had rusted.  You can see they’ve cut out the bottom so tourists could walk on the cement underneath.

Here’s a picture of one of the above-ground storage tanks that was destroyed in the bombing.  There’s a person standing at the bottom of this picture, that gives you an idea of how big they were.  The last tank had only just been completed and filled five days before the bombing.  Nearly all of them were destroyed.

We laughed at this picture of these military men holding a crocodile.  This one is actually quite a good size to be held like that!  We’ve learned that crocodiles are quite soft.  I wonder how many of them had seen one before being stationed in Darwin.

The wrecks of six ‘flying boats’, Catalinas, still remain in Darwin Harbour.  A total of 33 were lost, half of them in the initial bombing.

There’s a gorgeous timeline of Darwin’s history on the wall.  Look at the illustrations underneath, they’ve been cut out of a metal sheet with lights glowing through from behind.

There were a total of 64 air raids in Darwin in 1942-43.  They started building the tunnels in 1943.  They were kept a secret from the public until 1992 when they opened for the 50th anniversary of the bombing.

Would you believe the tunnels never stored oil?  Six tunnels were built at a cost way over budget and were never used as intended.  It was hot in there when we visited, I can barely imagine what it was like for the workers who built the tunnels, to do so in the heat and with a steam shovel adding humidity to the air.  And all in secret, too.  This was a very unique tourist attraction, something we’ll always remember about Darwin.

A Blog Break

Recently I’ve taken a blogging break but I think I’m ready to keep going now.  I’ve got several posts written but haven’t gotten them published.  It seems that no matter how hard I work on this blog I am always at least a month behind.

Creating a blog post means choosing pictures, editing pictures, writing text, and formatting everything.  It’s time-consuming and becomes overwhelming when I feel like I’ll never catch up.  But this is the journal of our trip and so it is important to us (to me!) to get it done.  The kids have paper journals but they are very reluctant to work on them most of the time.  Is a half-hearted attempt at a journal still worth it?  I’m not sure but I make them do a page every once in a while anyway.  Maybe I’ll look at getting this blog turned into a book for each of them one day.  Another reason to keep it going!  Eventually I hope to go back and blog about parts I’ve skipped, even if I have to do it after we stop travelling. 

So when will we stop travelling?  Currently we are in Exmouth, Western Australia.  We are enjoying the cool ocean breeze and the lower humidity.  We’ll be heading south down the coast from here.  Around the bend, then east through South Australia and back to Victoria.  But we plan to be home only for a few weeks before heading off again.  We’ll head to the east coast for the second time, as far north as Brisbane at least, then south along the east coast all the way back to Victoria.  That puts us home sometime after Easter.  Then we may be done.  We’ll see.  :)

Bruny Island Berry Farm

A flashback from Tasmania last March when we were on Bruny Island.  There’s a map in this post that shows where we were.

There are a few berry picking farms in Tasmania, enough that there’s even a lovely tourist brochure highlighting them all for you. We decided to save our berry picking adventures for Bruny Island where we visited…are you ready?…the aptly named Bruny Island Berry Farm. 

This could possibly be the best berry farm location ever.  Right across from the water!

Unfortunately by waiting this long into our trip to Tasmania we pretty much missed berry picking season.  They told us to have a wander through anyway, and if the kids found a few strawberries they could feel free to pick them.  TurboBug was way more interested in the little owl bobble-head statues.  He kept pointing out their ears, eyes, and noses.  I was afraid he’d accidentally take the head off one of them!  [He would have been about 20 months old here.  So that means four months later we were on the Sunshine Coast in QLD, since that’s where we celebrated his birthday!]

We did find a few berries here and there, they grow many different kinds on the farm.  I think this is a blueberry, at least it looks like one that isn’t quite the right colour yet.

We wondered about the tazziberries but didn’t get to try any.  Do they only grow in Tasmania?

We did pick a couple of strawberries each.  I think SkeeterBug (10) found the only large one they had left!

After our berry picking adventure we sampled the lovely ice cream.

Don’t worry, the youngest was not forgotten.

He even held it up for a picture.

They had one of those tennis games set up, we have one of these packed away at home so the kids were happy to see it.  I convinced JitterBug (7) to let his little brother have a turn with him for a little while.  He obliged and TurboBug lost interest before long and JitterBug had it all to himself. 

Because there was an awesome old truck to play with.  What else could a toddler need?

I walked down to have a little wander on the beach.  The weather was getting cooler by then, beach season in Tassie was pretty much over by March, or at least it was this far south.  If I’m remembering correctly, that’s Penguin Island in the distance which we saw more closely when we did the walk to Grass Point.

Lovely, lovely Tasmania, how lucky we are to have visited you!

A Surprise Didgeridoo Performance

A bit of a flashback, just back to Alice Springs…

When looking at things to do in Alice Springs I came across the Sounds of Starlight Theatre.  We would have loved to attend the Didgeridoo Show Outback, but it was a bit over our budget so I crossed it off our list.  The caravan park we stayed at in Alice had a didgeridoo presentation on the weekend so we thought we’d go see what that was like.  I was so surprised when it turned out to be the guy from the theatre, Andrew Langford!

He played a good number of songs and incorporated many different sounds, just a taste of what his multimedia performance would be like at the theatre.  TurboBug (2) had all the grey nomads smiling as he danced to the music.  :) 

He talked about the history of the didgeridoo, how they are made, and gave all sorts of tips on how to play one, even having us puff out our cheeks and practice circular breathing at one point.  It was like a mini version of one of his workshops.

He showed us several instruments including this curly didgeridoo, I can’t remember what it’s called.  He had a couple of these for sale, they were beautiful.  He also showed us that you can use something as simple as PVC pipe for a didgeridoo!

He left those PVC pipe didgeridoos out along with that curly one for anyone to have a go.  This was all taking place in the camp kitchen with the playground right next to it, all the kids were coming and going (not just ours!) during the presentation but they all gathered around at the end to try out the didgeridoos.

This caravan park had weekly activities scheduled for most nights, the didgeridoo performance took place every weekend.  They also had a lovely pancake breakfast once a week, I’ve never seen such a production!  So many pancakes and they have their whole system down pat.  All the batter was in huge buckets and they have a large cooking surface on the back of a ute, they would make a couple dozen at once, all plate-size.  One poor guy’s job was to carefully peel off the pancake on top of the stack and place it on your plate.  He never got a break, just as he’d get to the end of his pile they’d be ready with more.  They had all different kinds of syrups, from maple to chocolate.  We all enjoyed our multiple servings, I’ll never make pancakes again without thinking of those guys with their pancake ute!