Darwin Doldrums

Landing again in Australia had me bouncing in my seat, giddy as a castaway who happens upon the relief of alien shores. I was barefoot in the plane, and noticed for the first time that the toe nail polish applied by Helen in the magic of West Oz had finally rubbed off entirely. My Working-Holiday visa was good for 1 year and I’d just spent half of it in China, which meant I had just 2 months now to breathe that southern air before my visa expired. I had first arrived in August, so this timing coincided perfectly well with summer break, and after my visa expired I would be returning to China and resuming my job as an English teacher.

Immediately after leaving China, I had spent 2 weeks decompressing with my brother in Bali before going back to Oz, so now I thought I was ready to get down to business. It was crucial that I find a job and keep it for just 2 weeks in order to fulfill my visa requirements.

What this means is that my visa lasted for 1 year, but one stipulation of an Australian Working-Holiday visa is that you can only get it once unless you perform up to 3 months of work in any of the various designated labor fields. Then you could earn yourself another year, and you could even earn a 3rd year if you completed another 6 months work during your 2nd year. Avocado picking just so happened to count as a required labor field, and I had worked on Jasper Farms for 2 and a half months, so if I wanted to be granted the option of another Working-Holiday year, then I would have to be employed for just 2 weeks in any one of the required labor fields. This was crucial.

I landed in the dark at 10pm in early July. It was summer in China, but winter now in Australia. More accurately, it was the dry season in Darwin, and sweater weather at night. Despite the late hour, I was still shocked at how empty the airport was. Where was everybody? I stepped out into the breeze and smoked the last of my Chinese cigarettes while waiting for the bus.

The bus halted with a loud hiss that echoed through the empty streets, and the driver opened the door.

“Oi! Surprised ta see ye out heah, mite! Where ye headed?” Charming and friendly, as always.

“I’m heading into town, I see there are a few hostels on this main street?”

“Shaw thin’ mite! Hop aboad!”

I was the only passenger, and the driver was listening to a baseball game being broadcast over the radio. I looked out into the darkness and tried to make heads or tails of the passing shapes, and of my general environment. It wasn’t the route I had expected to take when I left from Perth 10 months ago, but regardless, I had finally arrived in Darwin.

I had expected something resembling a city, but Darwin was a small town, hardly larger than Bunbury. Australia’s northernmost settlement, which I had thought would be its shining gate to Southeast Asia, turned out to be a dusty outpost in the far corner of nowhere, bypassed by all major international shipping lanes. You could measure the age of the towns economic slump by peering at it’s architecture; it seemed that there hadn’t been significant financial growth since the 80’s, as the buildings all sported a sort of retro postmodern aesthetic. Indeed, walking through Darwin in the day felt remarkably like walking through a run down shopping mall. It was all remarkably well preserved, possibly due to the dry air and absent weather which occupied half of each year. I never saw a cloud once while I was living there. It was magnificent, and I considered spending my whole 2 months in that forgotten wonderland, but regardless, fate would come to take me to another.

One glaring and immediate downside I noticed was that I happen to be a rather amphibious sort of person, and it isn’t safe to go swimming in Darwin. The ocean looks so cool, calm, and inviting, but lurking beneath the surface of glistening waters were scores of those 20 foot long reptilian relics from the land before time— salt water crocodiles. They stood out as the apex predator, but the other wildlife in Darwin was remarkably alien as well. In the glowing streetlights at night (the ones that were lit anyways), you could spot the swooping and fluttering of bats so big you’d worry they might just fly away with your dog. In the daylight, those flying gargoyles were replaced with the most beautiful birds of paradise. It seemed so fitting that this town be named after the father of evolution.

The bus driver stopped, let me out under an isolated streetlight with my bags, and drove off into the night. I appeared to be just off the main street, though here too was remarkably quiet. In the distance, I could hear the faint sound of disco music echoing through the concrete alleys, so I took off walking in that direction. My research highlighted an abundance of hostels on this strip, as Darwin is a popular stop for backpackers, but I didn’t have the strength for shopping around that night. I was beginning to feel the effects of some undercooked chicken I’d been served during my flight with Virgin Australia, but at the time I took it to be simple travel fatigue. Upon dragging my overstuffed green duffle bag down the street and turning the corner, my suspicions about the music were confirmed: it was indeed emanating from a hostel. It was a large, shabby looking party hostel called the Youth Shack.

As soon as I poked my head around the corner, I discovered where everyone had gone. It must have been Friday, because the party was in full swing. There were people going in and out, to and from one of the adjacent bars, and there must have been a hundred people crowded in the courtyard, surrounding the pool, drinking, diving, splashing, yakkity-yakking about this and that. There was a bar by the pool, directly in the hostel courtyard, and everything was lit by either the warm, radiant orange glow of the bar lights, or the serene blue glow of the pool lights. I dragged my bags up to reception and purchased a room for the night. I was dog tired now, and it must have shown because just as I picked up my bags with a slightly audible grunt, I heard a female voice:

.

I considered skipping the bar and just hitting the sack for the night, but stepping into my room I was immediately overwhelmed by the scent of rotting bananas. Every surface in the room was littered with wrappers and bits of food. Dirty laundry was strewn about all over the floor. I was meant to be the 3rd person in this 4 person dorm room,

but it looked as though the room had been occupied for months by a family of dingoes. My roommates weren’t in, so I just cleared some debris off of the top bunk where I’d be sleeping, sat down my bags, and went down to the bar. Despite my fatigue, I couldn’t bare another minute of that horrible stench.

“Need a hand with those?”

I turned around to see a girl, about 5 feet high, standing somewhat self-consciously in front of me. She wore brown dreadlocks, a tie-dye crop top, and glitter on her face like she had just flown in from Electric Forest. She was beautiful like a fairy or a wood sprite; the spirit of the Youth Shack.

The receptionist leaned over and said,

“Belle, could you show this young man to room 2-B?”

“Sure! Follow me, kid!” She grabbed one of my bags and I followed her past the bar and up some steps to my room.

“Will you be coming down to the bar tonight?” she asked.

“Yeah, OK. Just after I get settled in.” I responded with a cheery smile to mask my fatigue. She smiled back.

“Alright, seeya down there!” and with that she walked back down the stairs to the courtyard, dissolving once more into the party.

I went down to the bar, ordered myself a beer, and sat myself at a vacant picnic table, feeling somewhat shut off from the bubbling social reef. I was sipping my beer while surveying the scene when Belle sat down beside me, and another figure slumped down in the seat across, piss drunk. He was French, and she was an island girl from some tiny somewhere, somewhere near the Maldives. We exchanged a quick greeting, but they were caught in the thick of a serious political discussion:

“Zey are taking our culture! We cannot stand by and let zis happen to us! But oh, ze media says every-sing eez okay! I have seen it myself, zey are bringing crime, zey are burning cars! Whole parts of Pari, you cannot be safe, but ze media says nossing!”

Their topic was the growing reach of Islam in France. Belle had also lived in France, and didn’t believe that the situation was as bad as the man was saying. “How is it not our duty to assist the refugees from Syria?” she stammered, “Put yourself in their shoes! They need a home, and shelter away from the war!”

“Zey do not just have zees! Zey receive a check from ze government, no? Een my own town, zey leeve in beeg houses, and zey do not work! Why should I work, and zey do not have to? And do zey bozzer to learn ze language? Nuh! Zey talk to only ze Arab!”

Rather than take a position in the debate, I attempted to play the part of a journalist, asking the Frenchman in great detail about the situation, and what he had witnessed himself as opposed to what was depicted in the media. I was under

the impression that these two both had rather naive, copied and pasted opinions on the matter, but I was fascinated to meet a French conservative, as typically conservatives don’t travel internationally. I was also under the impression that this man was the sort who went looking for an argument whenever he was drunk. Belle seemed like the sort who hated to argue, but couldn’t resist attempting to validate this opinion that she’d once heard a convincing argument for, though she really couldn’t remember how it went.

We all enter into this debate at some point in our lives, and it’s much bigger than the reach of Islam in France. Hopefully with maturity, we come to realize the futility of this political tug of war, seeing that the problem is never as simple as either side would believe, and the media just rakes the surface for an emotional sound bite. In the case of the Frenchman, I believed he was right that refugees were bringing crime because refugees are desperate by nature. Because crime involves a high degree of risk, it is most often committed by the people who are desperate enough to take that chance; it’s all about a simple evaluation of risk vs reward. But Belle was far closer to a legitimate solution to the problem, because if refugees could be properly housed and fed, and of course given work, then they wouldn’t be desperate enough to be dangerous. I didn’t get a chance to say any of this at the time.

Finishing my beer, I began to feel like this was the most moronic conversation I’d ever taken part in. I suddenly felt like I hated everyone in that whole courtyard, and I hated the thought of sleeping in a room that smelled of rotten bananas, and I hated everything that moved except maybe for Belle. I realized that I was actually just desperately exhausted, so I slumped off to bed, and tried getting used to the smell.

But I couldn’t get used to it, and I was too tired to sleep. Lying awake for maybe an hour or two, and beginning to feel horribly dizzy and nauseous, I starred at the ceiling

and felt like the world was a terrible place to live. Bali and my brother were fresh in my memory, and China was behind me, and I never had to go back there again if I didn’t want to, but for some reason I was making plans to go back there anyways. For 4 timeless months in Bunbury, I had walked in the garden of Eden, and then I had thrown myself out of paradise and gone to China because I was crazy. I missed that world I knew in Bunbury, those friends, the love, the booze, the beach. Then for 6 long months in Ningbo, China, I had longed to see the sun. I had stewed in lonely agony, I had drank myself to sleep in blue TV light; too tired, too crazy, and too poor to make friends. For 6 months I lived mostly like a hermit, locked in a tower with worsening insomnia, where by desperate mornings I would climb up to the roof and chain smoke cigarettes under the dark gray Mordor drizzle, head spinning with lonely dreams and fantasies of wild escape, and I looked out across a vast industrial sprawl at the lights of the airport in the distance, and I was like Gatsby reaching for those lights, and in my mind I heard the echo of the rolling ocean— beautiful, dark, mysterious waves that I would spend a lifetime at the mercy of. Why the hell was I planning on going back to China?

I woke up suddenly in the night, and ran to the shared bathroom where I wretched my guts out over the only toilet that wasn’t already full of shit or puke. Then, sweating and shaky, I sat down in my underwear on that foul smelling, sticky tile floor, rested my head back against the side of the stall, and felt so much better. I felt like something evil had entered my body while I was in China, and now in an explosive display of exorcism, I had ejected most of it out from my stomach, and flushed it down the drain. The truth was however, that most of it was still in me, and it wouldn’t be nearly that easy to expel the rest.

The next day, I had chores to do. I had to figure out what process I would need to go through in order to apply for my specific Chinese work visa, I would need to go shopping for food and various items, before which I would need to go to the bank and unfreeze my debit card, which was frozen after somebody stole a thousand dollars using a false ATM machine in Bali. It would also be an excellent opportunity for me to scope out Darwin by daylight. Rather than do any of this however, I went into the vacant lounge room at the end of the hall and watched Slumdog Millionaire, and then Apocalypse Now. I wasn’t bothered in there all day; my assumption is that the room’s primary function was actually served at night.

I didn’t care about that then though. I couldn’t care about anything. It seemed like the fire was gone from my heart, and the urgency of life and youth were gone from my eyes, and I didn’t even care to explore this new landscape, or to feel the sun or the air, or to try to make a friend. I sat alone in the dark and watched movies in the blue TV light until it was night time again, and it was then that I was sure I had not fully exercised that evil spirit which had first gripped me in those dark nights in China. At one point I saw a cockroach as big as my hand skitter out from under one of the couch cushions; I killed it with my shoe, but one doesn’t see couch cushions the same after that. I finally crawled out of that mildewy dark room and into the cool air of the courtyard, which was buzzing with the Saturday party crowd.

I ordered some food and a beer, and tried mingling. I ended up joining a card game with a crowd who was smoking weed up on the balcony which overlooked the courtyard, and was able to buy a couple of grams for myself. I hadn’t smoked in 6 months, and it was exactly the medicine I needed. The next morning I smoked some more, and now had the energy to start doing my chores. Before doing any of that however, I packed up my bags and left that wretched place for a hostel called Chili’s Backpackers just down the street. Just that night I finished reading a copy of Scar Tissue

that I’d picked up at a hidden used book store in Bali, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been a staple of my Australian soundscape, so Chili’s struck me as a sign. Always chase a pattern.

My time at Chili’s all in all was very fond— I stayed there for a week doing many little visa related chores throughout the days, then applying for a few jobs, and then relaxing with Between the Acts, a book by Virginia Woolf that I had picked up in the hostel’s free book bin. I would sometimes end my day by smoking weed with my feet in the hot tub. It was not meant to be a party hostel, but all that really even meant was that the place managed to maintain a basic amount of respectability and cleanliness; it didn’t stop the residents from getting wild in a good way. Chili’s was not quite as large as the Youth Shack, but probably still could house a good hundred or so residents during its peak season. Aside from the hot tubs on the patio, amenities included a large 2nd floor kitchen with a window and balcony overlooking street traffic, as well as the fact that I was placed all by myself in a vacant 4 bed dorm room.

Among many of the things that I observed down on the streets of Darwin were lots of homeless aboriginal people, something which had largely escaped my attention back in Perth. Indeed, all throughout the dusty Northern Territory, wherever there were people, there were aboriginal people dressed in rags— starving, begging, maniacally raving in the street. There was clearly a big problem, but what was it? It was so much. It was a poverty spiral, it was a broken promise; it was like the Syrian refugees. It was stress, like the biggest migraine you ever had, and it just doesn’t go away ever since you were a kid, and you just aren’t strong enough to pull yourself up, and now that makes it your fault. And alcohol makes the migraine go away, and why talk nice to the pale servants of that loud machine whose hands hold you down, whose shriek gives you migraines?

I was always starring at the street while lost in thought, either from smoking or from reading, but often enough I would be awoken by one of the other residents. There was that cute German girl who smiled at me once, there was the hippie couple with their baby daughter, there was the alcoholic prospector fellow just here on business, and as always, there was a whole cast of French backpackers who were the wildest. They liked to party and kept a heavy dance beat following them at all times, were always out smoking cigarettes by the hot tub, and also were wild about drugs. I would often join them for a cigarette, and there found myself talking to an inebriated French accountant, inquiring about what was really happening on his homefront. When I explained to him the opinion of the disgruntled conservative I had met before, this guy just shook his head:

“Nooo... I agree, zis ees umm beeg problem een France, refugees, but zey are not problem like zees. I sink France should do better job to take care of ze Arab, but no zees ees not taking our culture... een fact, you go to Pari, you see now glass tower... and maybe some places eet look like old pari... but ees not so um, special, you know?”

I was actually a little relieved to gather that there was a wide political rift in France as well, so it wasn’t a problem entirely unique to the quaking United States.

There was this old woman I would talk to as well. She must have been about 60 years old, and had been a road train driver, delivering goods to the outposts lightly sprinkled up and down the barren desert highways. We would talk for maybe an hour each morning with our cigarettes, and sometimes we would share some pot. The road train operators of Australia are legendary, mythical creatures. It is regarded to be the loneliest job on the planet; often these drivers, these crawlers of desolation, will drive for days or weeks through the barren desert and bush without seeing two souls all the while. When one spends any considerable amount of time with only themselves, if it doesn’t drive them mad, it may spur on a metamorphosis into the sort of person that they themselves would enjoy spending time alone with. That would explain the serene yet somewhat rough-and-tumble attitude of Mel, the retired Australian road train driver.

There were many others who passed through for just a night or two. I had my room to myself mostly, though there was a night when some German backpackers arrived and I went out to the club with them. Somehow even in Dusty old Darwin the clubs got packed with backpackers from all of the 6 or 7 hostels lining the main street. We ended up getting locked out of the hostel while a major arrest was happening across the street, where apparently an aboriginal man had tried to stab someone. So there we were, the Germans and myself, lying piss drunk on pavement lit by the flashing of squad cars and smoking cigarettes while waiting for someone who had a key, all trying to avoid making eye contact with the dozen or so cops. Finally we were let inside by a passing saint whose name I would soon discover was Kurt.

The next morning I went out to smoke, and since the balcony was filled up with the whole cast of French characters, I asked to sit with Kurt who was rolling a cigarette by himself. Kurt was Scottish, and hadn’t seen his home in 4 years now. He had spent that time teaching English in South Korea, and now was ready to go and see his family again in the beautiful Scottish countryside, but not before a 2 month tour of Australia for decompression. He had just arrived in Australia like me, and had also just spent 2 weeks in Bali like me. Also like me, he had been 22 when he left home. Always chase a pattern.

We got to be friends quickly, and what started as a light cigarette conversation ended up with the 2 of us

exploring the streets of Darwin together in search of an ideal perch for watching the sunset over Darwin Bay. We strolled all over Darwin arguing points made by the Communist Manifesto, which he’d read, and discussing solutions to the problem of poverty. Later that night I received a call about a job I’d applied for in a roadhouse to the south called Daly Waters, and I’d be leaving the next day. I asked Kurt for some way to keep in contact with him, but he was a modern monk with no phone or social media.

I woke up at 6am the next morning, packed up my clothes and hammock, and found my way to the Greyhound.

(I would end up working in the Daly Waters Pub for just 3 days before getting fired under dubious circumstances and thrown out into the Ozzie desert. From there I took the bus another night down to Alice Springs, the bleeding red heart of Oz, where I remained unemployed and overstayed my Visa by a month, but experienced true friendship and great adventure, and went to Sydney then, and China from there, and on and on I tumbled over the earth under the winds of this big, bizarre, indifferent universe, and still to this day I am tumbling.)

I spent a lot of time sitting and watching

from the kitchen or from the balcony.