Our Last Day in Darwin

Yesterday was our last day in Darwin before we begin our road trip to some interesting places and eventually home.

After checking out from the Free Spirit Resort in Palmerston (where our reunion was based), we drove back along the Stuart Highway into the city. Our first destination was to the Botanical Gardens. It was nice to sit in the shade for coffee at the Evas Gardens Cafe taking it easy after all the activity of the last five days. 

The gardens are a shady refuge in this tropical city. They were created by the German botanist Dr. Maurice Holtze who had worked in the Royal Gardens in Hanover and the Imperial Gardens in St Petersburg before migrating to Australia. He became the government gardener at the Palmerston (Darwin) Botanic Gardens from 1878-1891. 

Going for a walk, we were at first misdirected into a wonderful playground with a treehouse and large play area that was occupied by a bunch of small, and noisy, little kids. We worked out that we had gone in the wrong direction and backtracked to the main area of the gardens. There, we found a magnificent display of plants from northern Australia and tropical areas around the world.

After a lunch back at the cafe, we moved on to our second destination at the Darein Museum. The Museum has excellent short term exhibitions as well as being home to internationally renowned artistic, cultural and scientific collections. There are a number of grand rooms that have displays of Aboriginal art – both paintings and sculptures as well as scientific and cultural displays.

A part of the museum is an evocative Cyclone Tracy exhibition. Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin on December 24-25, 1974, just before Christmas. It was a Category 4 cyclone on the Australian scale, with wind gusts exceeding 217 km/h (135 mph). Some unofficial reports suggest gusts reached up to 240 km/h, but by then the wind measuring equipment was broken. It caused catastrophic damage to Darwin. Around 70% of the city’s buildings were destroyed, including 80% of the homes. Most of the remaining structures were severely damaged. eventy one people lost their lives—65 on land and six at sea. Thousands of others were injured. In the aftermath, about 35,000 of Darwin’s 47,000 residents were evacuated. The scale of the destruction and the subsequent mass evacuation was unprecedented in Australian history.

The museum also houses the body of ‘Sweetheart’ the Crocodile – one of the largest saltwater crocs ever caught in the Territory.

For our final dinner in Darwin, we ate at the Jetty Restaurant on Stokes Hill Wharf. We used it to celebrate our 52nd wedding anniversary that was actually a couple of weeks ago. We had a wonderful meal of seafood – oysters, prawns, mussels along with seaweed salad and octopus salad. Yummy!