After a sleep in this morning Jude and I went into town to have a look at Charles Darwin National Park while Sean stayed home with Rosie.
The National Park covers quite a few hectares and is right next to the main city area. Much of it is swamp and mangrove area with some higher ground where there are 10 ammunition stores scattered throughout. These place were built in 1941 and are partly underground i.e. they have earth sides and top so they would be invisible from above. I also discovered that Darwin was named after Charles Darwin - a fact that may be very obvious but had escaped me until now.
Inside one of these stores is a display of the types of ammo kept in them along with stories related to the war effort.
This chart depicts the scope of the Japanese push from late 1941 till early 1943. In that time they had conquered the majority of the pacific island nations and were ready to strike out to Aus.
On this display there are several stories but the one that catches the eye is "Naked Gun Risks all for Darwin". This guy was in the shower when the air attack began. He ran out with his towel wrapped around and began shooting at the enemy planes. He tried using several different objects as sighting aids without success. He then got one of his fellow soldiers to stand in front of him and sighted his gun over his mates shoulder. They fired away despite being strafed from above, then got very excited when they hit one plane causing it to crash. They were both given medals however it wasn't until the planes were gone that he realised the towel had fallen off long ago and he'd been starkers the whole time.
There's a lot of burning off occurring in and around Darwin at this time - in the national park this fire was proceeding nicely about 0m from the road.
Next we went to have a look at Cullen Bay. This is where the other half lives - it reminded us of Sanctuary Bay in QLD - very exclusive. This is also the spot where one catches a ferry to Mandorah on the other side of the peninsula, or one can catch the Arafura Pearl for a day trip to the Tiwi Islands (Bathurst and Melville) just off the coast for a mere $300 per person.
We left the area to avoid any further daydreaming and returned to the van. Then we all went off to the Leanyer Recreation Park (again). This time Jude came along to take some photos of Sean and I coming down the red slide.
Then back to the van and another evening of chatting with our neighbours Dave and Gail.
The Campbells
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