Darwin is a small town compared with Sydney, but it's the capital of the Northern Territory. It was around 35 degrees and that didn't change much as the nights wore on (I walked home from events after midnight on the balmy evenings, still over 30 in the dark!). Much of the trade there comes from tourism so there was the usual glut of drunken backpackers, but I avoided their haunts and found some fab little cafes and bars.
Although I went on my own I knew a few people working on the festival, so caught up with some old friends and made plenty of new ones. I also found the locals very friendly and often got into chats with people at gigs and shows.
The festival also created a 'hub' where most patrons gathered in the evening. A roofless big top, with strings of lights instead of a roof, was the focal point of many music events, and many people spent their evenings there eating and drinking and socialising.
I saw some great theatre, and brilliant dancing, especially a group of dancers from a remote island called The Chooky Dancers. You may know then from their YouTube version of Zorba the Greek:
They were hilarious and the schoolkids in the audience loved them too. That was one of the most interesting things I found up in Darwin, was that the audiences were less PC and they really responded loudly and with abandon to whatever they were seeing.
My favourite things were the play readings -- I saw three new plays which were early drafts, read by actors, and the audience then chatted about it afterwards and gave the writer feedback: a valuable step in the writing process.
One day I escaped the town and took a bus to Kakadu National Park. This is some of the most ancient land in Australia, where many indigenous people still live in conditions similar to those they were found in when the first white settlers arrived. There are many communities in the Northern Territory which have more in common with those ancestors that with the Western way of life. The landscape is beautiful, and I saw some aboriginal rock paintings which were thousands of years old. Quite mind-blowing really.
I have such a great respect for the aboriginal culture and I enjoy learning more about it. I also took a boat on a billabong (a lake formed by a river changing its course) and saw some fascinating wildlife, including... crocodiles! Eek. They're pretty scary in the wild and I would not want to get in a fight with one!
While I was in Darwin, Australia had a general Election, which then took 4 weeks to have an outcome.
Luckily we have one now -- the country's first female Prime Minister, and a parliament where the balance of power lies with a few radical independents. Going to be an interesting three years!
Now I'm back in Sydney, where the temperatures are less balmy and Spring has sprung. There's a lot going on, I'll try to blog about it soon!
cx
