…But HMS Beagle was. In 1839 the ship was on a survey mission to Northern Australia. Both the Captain and Lieutenant remembered Charles Darwin fondly so they named the bay Port Darwin. The city that grew up around the bay became Darwin. Given the strange fauna and flora of the continent it was a fitting name.
The thing I was most interested in seeing in Darwin was the Royal Flying Doctor Service Museum, which was just off the bow of our ship. To get there we had to walk off the ship, off our wharf and over to the next wharf, about a 15/20 minute walk. There is a covered walk along the top of the breakwater that creates a lagoon. We could walk, somewhat dryly, to the museum a pouring rainstorm.
The lagoon shelters a swimming area. It’s dangerous to swim at any of the nearby beaches because of crocodiles and box jellyfish, which are poisonous and sometimes fatal. We’re here during the monsoon season, which is also box jellyfish season. It is also in the middle of the crocodile mating season when crocs are most aggressive. The lagoon seems like a good idea, but not today with thunderstorms in the area. Darwin is the lightning capital of Australia, and possibly the world. More than a million cloud to ground strikes have been recorded in Darwin since September 2022.
The Royal Flying Doctor Service museum is more “an experience” than a museum and more large gift shop than either. It’s as much about Darwin in World War Two as it is about flying doctors. There is more digital stuff than there are artifacts, but the artifacts are ones that interest me. I have special fondness for air ambulances because I’ve experienced a medevac on one. The museum had an equipped Swiss Pilatus PC 12 built in 1995. Before being retired she flew almost 17 thousand takeoff and landing cycles and carried more than 7,500 patients. Injuries included 45 snake bites, 73 severe burns and more than 400 fractures. The youngest patient was an infant, the oldest — 99.
The other displays that interested me included radio equipment. To contact the service folks at bush stations, they needed radios. The flying service developed pedal powered radios in 1929. But most of the people at the stations didn’t know morse code, which was the most practical and reliable radio communication over distance using low power. In 1931 Alfred Traeger who invented the pedal powered radio, developed a typewriter that transferred keystrokes to dots and dashes in the era before computers.
There were two holographic shows, one about the history of the service from the beginning through telemedicine. The second was the story of a US ship commander during the Japanese air raid on Darwin in February 1942. The virtual reality presentations were from the nurse’s perspective flying a critically ill patient, and the piolet’s view. The third VR presentation came with trigger warnings for people with PTSD, a VR experience of the Japanese bombing of Darwin. There was a separate wide screen presentation viewing the bombing from the wharf where we were standing. The wharf gets blown up with us on it.
After the museum we took the city bus along the harbor back to the ship. It only runs at midday when it isn’t used for rush hour. We transferred to another bus to go downtown.
We walked through a park past the territorial legislature and courts until we were hit by another downpour so we made for the ship to dry off.
That night we watched the movie “Australia” staring, of course, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It featured the bombing of Darwin in 1942. To me it was more convincing and scarier than either the wide screen, VR or holographic presentations.
