by Magda D. Healey

Created on: December 10, 2010

Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory and the largest city for over a thousand kilometres, has a population slightly in excess of 100,000. The whole Territory, in fact, has less than quarter of a million, one in three of them of Aboriginal origin.

Darwin feels – and to large extent, still is – a frontier town. Many people who live here seem to be from somewhere else, migrants, transients, adventure seekers and life drop-outs alike. The climate is seriously tropical – with two seasons, the Dry (this is, by the way, a relative term, as the Dry is only dry in comparison to the humidity of the Wet) and the Wet (which is seriously Wet, Darwin being well within the monsoon sphere of influence). The tourist season is in the Dry, and most local activities, from the Darwin Show to the Darwin Race Weekend, take place between April and November too.

Even in the winter (or, as it would be correctly called, in the Dry), Darwin is very hot, with the average temperature of around 28C and only a small variation of 4C between the average hottest (February and September) and coldest (July) months. Humidity, however, varies from 25% in July to over 40% in January and February. This is true tropics, more than anywhere else in Australia (it is, after all, four degrees north of Cairns and seven degrees north of Townsville), and the influence – and closeness – of Asia (Port Moresby is as near, or as far, as Cairns; and Singapore is as far as Melbourne) is palpable.

As befits a frontier tropical town, Darwin has a serious drinking scene – some would say a drink problem – and it's not just for the uprooted and biologically more susceptible indigenous Australians but for pretty much everywhere here, putting away copious quantities of grog of all varieties is a favourite pastime.

In the centre, the revelries centre on Mitchell and Smith Streets, where backpacker travellers and locals alike vie for the title of the most drunk and (mildly, in all honesty) disorderly; but the drinking is everywhere, from the airport cafe to family hotels and everywhere in between.

The frontier mentality has probably something to do not just with the huge distance between Darwin and anywhere else (and the fact that it's rather isolated from the rest of Australia) but also with the many disasters that befell Darwin in its history, among others the famous Tracy cyclone that literally flattened the town on Christmas Eve 1974 and Darwin having been bombed

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