Tess Lea

Darwin is the only Australian capital city I’ve never visited, but whereas Peter Timms’ book In Search of Hobart in the same New South City Series made me want to pack up and move to Tassie overnight, Tess Lea’s impressionistic survey of Darwin makes me want to avoid it. I just couldn’t put up with the weather:

… Darwin is a place where the imported seasonal markers of summer, autumn, winter and spring have no meaning. Locally, people note two main seasons: ‘the Wet’, a brief but intense monsoonal deluge from January through to March; and ‘the Dry’, a long drought extending from April through to September. By December people are willing storms to break the searing heat and rising humidity that precedes the Wet. Locals call this bridge period ‘the build-up’, a reference both to the climbing humidity and temperatures, and the mounting stress of the sticky, sapping heat. Alternative names are mango madness, the silly season, even the suicide season.

It is as if the body registers as a psychic assault the lowering air pressure from thunderstorms brewing over warm water. […]

You are in a stifling sauna, not a romance novel of languid afternoons under the palms. Your brain seems to be melting and tempers flare; irritability spreads from itching skin to the whole world. Only the fish, mozzies, fleas and cattle ticks are happy, breeding faster in the steaming heat. (p. 13)

Well, of course, tourists don’t have to visit during the build-up or the monsoon. But Lea gives the impression that there are social disadvantages to Darwin too:

… for young people Darwin continues to have the attractions and the downsides of a large country town. ‘You endure the heat, you get drunk. If you stay, you can have a baby and maybe get a home loan. It’s better to get out,’ one young man told me, briefly back home for his studies ‘down south’. It can feel suffocating. (p.183)

And this:

‘It becomes very repetitive in Darwin after a while,’ she told me. ‘There’s a strong culture of drinking and drug-taking. Everyone in Darwin’s smoked weed or drunk crazy amounts of alcohol by age fifteen. It’s more expected there, more accepted.’ (p. 183)

And then there’s the cane toads and mosquitoes, urban crocodiles, and swimming pools that are unusually shallow, which means it warms up more readily in the build-up heat to a pea soup temperature, just when people are mad keen to escape the seething heat. Nothing lasts long: even the buildings corrode from within in the moist salty air, which is why it’s too expensive to protect what remains of the city’s heritage buildings.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/09/darwin-new-south-city-series-9-by-tess-lea/… (altro)