MEL/DRW/MEL

There's something about the weather

I was back in Darwin a few weeks ago with a lengthy to do list that included family, friends, coffees, markets, cooking, and watching the kids’ sports. The Northern Territory’s wet season was playing out on a grand scale; I’d forgotten how wet tropical weather could be, and how oppressive humidity felt. Supposedly it’s been the wettest of wet seasons, but that’s Darwin as most Territorians will tell you, and then they’ll remind you that they’ve survived worse¹. Still the wet seems to seep into your bones, and it certainly crept into my thoughts. Most mornings woke me to a beating rain and winds glancing off the roof and windows and that had me thinking of those sleeping rough.

The place always has me pondering – and I’m not completely sure why. Perhaps it is as simple as missing the family and friends when I leave. Oddly, it’s also about the weather. And at this time of year when it is the squelchingly lush, I dream of the landscape with its waterways, wetlands and mangrove forests spilling into the deep harbour and northern seas. My busy writers brain wants to explore murky puddles and wander through a snaking jumble of trees. I want to step into the quiet, cautiously, for its where the most beautiful and dangerous of NT’s wildlife² lay low and waiting.

My curiosity could simply be far more pedestrian, driven by thoughts of the transitory folk I’ve met there with their talk of future plans and working towards an exit strategy. Three years, five years, the end of the next contract, then it’s back to the home in suburban Sydney, or the coastal town in South Australia, or the waiting family overseas. Those stories remind me that Chris and I had our plans too. We were also temporary residents. We said we’d stay in Melbourne for no longer than a decade, then return to somewhere along the Queensland coast. But then things don’t always go the way you expect.

Perhaps I see in myself a bit of the Darwin transient, holding on to a snippet of Queensland weather that I’d scribbled into a notebook along with all our other plans. A decade ago, I had never visited Darwin or its surrounds, but it was in that notebook alongside an itinerary. Neither were the family living there a decade ago, so we had no reason to rush. I guess we thought we’d go in three years, five years or at the end of a contract.

I still think about moving to a place with warmer weather, back home to Queensland. No, not Darwin, I’m not able to reconcile with its troubled sociopolitical landscape (but that’s another story for another time). Honestly, I know I’m not going anywhere - not just yet. I have family here too, and some friends, and the dog. And then there’s the weather. I have fallen back into the space between the kaleidoscopic shades of autumn and the fallen leaves of winter. So I shall wait.

1. 1974 Cyclone Tracy decimated Darwin City «https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cyclone-tracy»

2. NT Crocodiles (and other dangerous wildlife)