Darwin Harbor

 Monday, December 18, 2023

After our crocodile adventure this morning, we came back into Darwin and headed down to Darwin Harbour for lunch at Wharf One, a lovely restaurant with a view of the harbour.  We got a cooking demonstration for cooking Barramundi - a fish grown in Australia that is similar to sea bass.  Barramundi take 2 years to mature enough for harvesting.  Our restaurant gets its Barramundi from a farming operation based out of - wait for it - Humpty Doo (what a great name!)  Humpty Doo is only about 30-40 minutes outside Darwin.  About half our group ordered the Barramundi and the rest of us got beef brisket.  I ordered the brisket and Carl had the Barramundi and we shared with each other.  The fish is very mild.

Chef preparing barramundi at Wharf One

After lunch we drove over to the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) museum, also at the wharf.  The building has both exhibits on the RFDS and the bombing of Darwin/Darwin Harbor in WWII.

The Royal Flying Doctor Service exhibit at Darwin

The presentations on the WWII history of Darwin Harbor were an eye opener.  Darwin Harbor was attacked by the Japanese on Feb. 19, 1942, just 7 weeks after Pearl Harbor.  The bombing raid resulted in lots of ships and planes being damaged or destroyed.  But the amazing thing is that Darwin and the harbor were attacked another 50+ times during the war!

The RFDS is a source of great pride in Australia.  The concept was first envisioned by John Flynn back in 1917-18.  Flynn was inspired after he heard the story of a rancher in the outback who was seriously injured falling off his horse.  He had to be transported over rough roads in a horse drawn wagon for 12 hours, only to find out he needed surgery.  The local "bush doctor" got instructions over telegraph (?) on how to perform the surgery (done without anesthesia or proper instruments).  In the meantime, the real doctor/surgeon who decided he needed to travel to attend to the rancher, took 12 days to reach him and when he arrived was told that the rancher had died just a day earlier (from malaria that he developed post-injury and was too weak to fend off).

The RFDS allows people who live in the remotest parts of Australia to have access to first rate medical care,  In the early days, the telegraph was the means to contact the RFDS and get medical advice or request that doctors fly out to provide care and/or transport patients for care in larger cities with medical facilities. Alfred Treiger developed pedal-powered generators to power transmitters for telegraph messages using morse code to contact/communicate with the RFDS.  

Pedal powered telegraph transmitter generator

In the early days there were problems because the folks using the pedal-powered transmitters didn't know morse code very well so there were scrambled and inaccurate messages.  So, Alfred developed a device that allowed folks to type in messages in English (like a typewriter) that translated into morse code.

The museum included a mock-up of one of the planes used by the RFDS which we could walk into.  Very cool!

RFDS plane

We finished our day back at the hotel with a dip in the pool, a nice shower and then we came down to the lobby to have dinner at the hotel restaurant.  Unfortunately, the hotel had missed one of their food deliveries, so nothing we wanted was available.  We ended up leaving with another couple (Gwen & Lou) who were experiencing the same problem and walked down a couple of blocks to an outdoor Italian restaurant called Alfonsitos, and had pizza and a salad and shared some good company and conversation.  On the way back to the hotel we stopped at John John's, a local ice cream shop, for a cool dish of ice cream.  Then it was back to the hotel and time for bed!