The Green Salad Sandwich Maker, and Other Darwin Stories

By Greg

Introduction

I think Trenna’s Darwin letters to my parents convey a lot of the colour and light of our two year stay at the top of Australia. If you haven’t caught up with them I suggest you start them HERE.

There were a few stories from that period that weren’t covered by Trenna’s letters, so I thought I’d cobble together a bunch of them in this post.

Decision to Go

We moved to Darwin so that I could take up the role of Manager, Student Administration at the Northern Territory University (NTU). It had been quite a good selection process with the short listed candidates being flown to Darwin for two days to be re-interviewed and to look over the university and the city.

To each person I spoke to I asked the question “What is the best thing about living in Darwin?”. And I also asked “What is the worst thing?”. Pretty well everyone said the best thing was the multiculturalism. And everyone said the worst thing about living in Darwin was the build-up to the Wet.

When Trenna and I moved, we arrived during the build-up to the Wet!

Early Impressions and Settling In

We were made very welcome when we arrived in Darwin, especially by my new boss, Margie Cole. Margie was an energetic, assertive sort of person. She had come from Tasmania (we VERY rarely met people who were born in Darwin) so she thought the weather in Darwin was fabulous.

We later realised that people who originally hailed from Tasmania or Victoria, Australia’s most Southern and coldest states, thought Darwin weather was good. People from all other states were far less emphatic about the merits of the Northern capital’s climate.

Within a week or so of arriving Margie had organised a lunch time party at her two story house. It was a fairly new house in the up-market suburb of Cullen Bay, just near a waterway.

Like most houses in Darwin it had tall Carpentaria palm trees that reached up, beyond the second floor. They had only been planted a few years earlier.

When we arrived there were already plenty of people there and all the kids and quite a few adults were in Steve and Margie’s swimming pool. There was laughter, yelps, and splashing aplenty.

By the way, Territorians always look into a swimming pool before jumping in. There have been many cases of crocodiles being in suburban swimming pools.

The weather on this day, and dozens of days before and dozens of days after it, was oppressively hot and humid. The humidity would have been well over 90%. That pool looked good.

We made our way to the second floor where there was a large wooden planked deck with expansive, triangular shade cloth sails stretched above. If there was any breeze we didn’t notice it.

Trenna and I got talking to Paul Corcoran, who, it turns out was Margie’s boss. So Trenna and I were on our best behaviour, me clutching a can of Victorian Bitter, Trenna with some water, and both of us fishing around for some small talk with which to engage Paul.

Paul was a nice guy, with a very solid build. He was carrying a bit more weight than he probably should. As we stood with him trying to come up with some common conversational ground Trenna saw that his hair was wet, his shirt was wet, I think his shorts even had some water on them.

So Trenna said “so Paul, what was the pool like?”

“I dunno, I haven’t been in yet”.

Silence. Then everyone realised the mistake. Paul was wet because he was sweating so much. I’m not sure if he commented, but he certainly knew of Trenna’s, understandable, faux par.

I think it was at this same party that we noticed a trend, a uniformity about the questions we got asked whenever we met new people in Darwin.

“Are you buying a house here?” By this they meant, “Is it worth me investing time and effort on a relationship with you, or are you just going to leave Darwin as soon as you can, like most new people?”

And “Do you have children?” Which means “Even if you are going to piss off soon perhaps you can take the kids off my hands for a while. At least the the kids might get some benefit from me knowing you.”

And “Do you like sport?” Which means “Well at least we can pass the time agreeing about or arguing about various teams.”

Our answers were always:

“No, we’ll see how we like it here.”

“No.”

“No.”

This didn’t really help us settle in and make a big circle of new friends.

Other Early Impressions

Accommodation

When we first started looking for a home to rent in Darwin it was quite sobering, and a little depressing. The quality of most of the housing was pretty poor, and it was all really expensive.

There was the place with the swimming pool. But it turned out to be an above ground pool, with rusty walls, a torn lining and only half full of decidedly green water.

Another place was raised on stilts but instead of using the shaded area created by this for an outdoor living area it had 2′ square concrete slabs, many of them cracked and lots of ugly oil stains from badly maintained cars.

Upstairs was no more appealing. There was no air conditioning, but most rooms had an overhead fan. Overhead fans are great in the tropics, you tend to leave them on 24 hours a day. However, there appeared to be one or more electricians in Darwin who thought it was a good idea to fix a light to the ceiling and then have the blades of the fan immediately below it.

If you like recreating the effects from a 1910 movie it is OK, but generally the strobing drives you nuts and you have to choose between light and air.

Well, that electrician had wired this place.

We were told the housing in Darwin was so dear because of the rigorous building standards to resist cyclones, and also because the defence force and other government departments subsidised their employees’ rents, artificially elevating them.

A major driver of us moving to Darwin was that it represented a substantial work promotion for me. At Curtin University I had been a Level 8 on the 10 point National Higher Education pay scale, my new job in Darwin was at Level 10.

When we had looked at all the affordable rentals and deciding we weren’t prepared to live in any of them we started looking at the unaffordable. Eventually we rented a new, 3 bedroom apartment with 270 degree views of the Arafura Sea.

And it had air conditioning and properly installed fans in every room.

It was very nice, but it sucked up ALL of my pay rise AND all the money we were getting for our just renovated, close to the city, house with a beautiful garden and swimming pool in Perth.

Mangoes

Being well and truly in the tropics there is a huge range of, what seem to us Southerners, exotic fruits. Many of the street trees are tall, wide mango trees. In season there is tons of fruit for the picking, provided you beat the fruit bats …. or maybe they were rats?

When we first arrived in Darwin the owner of the motel where we stayed at offered us some mangoes. I don’t think either of us had ever had one up until then. They tasted terrible, and as a consequence we never touched a mango again whilst in Darwin.

I now love mangoes, so I would very much like to know whether all mangoes in Darwin then were as bad as the ones we were offered, or perhaps there were nice varieties and horrible varieties, and we were just offered the wrong type.

Office Etiquette

I was quite shocked at the first few work meetings I went to at NTU. By then I had attended thousands of meetings at universities down South but that didn’t prepare me for the Territorian way.

“S#%t, I don’t give a f%&k about that!”

“Stuff that I’m not listening to this s#%t!”

Swear words were absolutely the go in NTU meetings, even at very high level meetings. And the gender of the speaker made absolutely no difference. It didn’t offend me in any way but I was certainly surprised.

Trena noticed it too when she started at the University.

Later in my career, when I had returned to Perth no one blinked an eye at the occasional swear word, but this was much, much more than that.

Retail

Take-away meals were not really big business in Perth or Darwin in the mid 1990s, but of what there was, Hungry Jacks (hamburgers) were probably the most successful chain. In Perth, after working in the garden all morning on a weekend we not uncommonly got a Whopper each for lunch.

Just before we left for Darwin we heard a news report that the Darwin HJs had blown up in the middle of the night. Apparently it was a gas leak.

When we got there we found out that it was the only HJs in town. We were definitely disappointed.

Two years, two months, two days later, as we were about to leave Darwin for ever, we found out that the local HJs was finally reopening the following week!

The other shock to the system was that there were no department stores in the whole Northern Territory. No Myer, no David Jones, nothing. There was one Kmart at Casuarina Square and a couple of years after we got there there was talk of a Target store opening soon at Palmerston.

Trenna lapped up the department stores on the couple of occasions she got to leave the Territory.

Settled

Passing Time During the Day

In about 1990, about a year after her heart valve replacement, Trenna and I had decided that there was no need for her to work full time – and working had become difficult for her.

After that she took on the role of full-time household manager, doing all the housework she was physically able to, and managing superbly the household finances.

When we went to Darwin she indicated to the University that she would consider casual, part-time positions, and she was offered a few.

However, for most of the time she was in our apartment every day whilst I was working long hours at work. Here, she continued the main housekeeper role.

Balachaung

Also at this time her interest in cooking really took off. I mention this in the introduction to The Menu Diaries, HERE.

Trenna often spent many hours in the Darwin kitchen experimenting and trying out new meals.

There was one cooking experience that I particularly remember. Trenna decided to make her own Balachaung. Now, she was aware of this spicy condiment, that gets added to all sorts of Asian dishes, as her sister Barb’s husband, Alan, who was originally from Burma had introduced her to it.

I don’t recall where Trenna got her recipe, possibly from a Gourmet Traveller magazine, but she was keen to try it. So, one Saturday morning this is what she started to prepare.

One of the ingredients needs a lot of cooking in the wok, and boy, did it stink! And then things got worse – it started to burn and acrid smoke filled the apartment, giving a different but equally obnoxious smell.

It was fans onto “high” and all windows open. Who knows what the neighbours thought?

It turns out the whole process takes hours and the smell is with you for most of the time.

We were comforted by knowing that at least with Trenna’s meal preparations, which were often long and involved, the end result was usually worth it.

Except in this case – it wasn’t. I don’t think we ever used it on any meal – it was burnt and horrible.

As it turns out, and we weren’t aware at the time, there is a whole secret sub-culture in Darwin when it comes to the almost identical condiment Blachan. This story from the ABC entitled “The underground world of blachan in the Northern Territory where recipes are top secret” delves into it a little. The opening line of the story is
“A drive out of Darwin and into the heart of the city’s suburbia, a peculiar smell drifts out of a home and it’s drawing in the flies.” You can read the rest HERE.
Apparently it is also a big deal in Broome, also in the tropics. In THIS STORY the final advice is “A word of advice; cook it outside because it will stink your entire house out for weeks.“

We remained fans of Balachaung, but we always just bought it in an Asian grocery store. We always had a jar on hand (and I still do) but Trenna never again tried to make her own.

TV

I am sure she didn’t watch much TV during the day (partly because Channel 8 was so bad) but she did regularly watch What’s Cooking? presented by Geoff Jansz, and she watched and joined in on Aerobics Oz Style.

Whilst on the topic of TV, I clearly remember the evening in Darwin when I was reading the TV guide to Trenna and I said.

“There’s a new show, Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

We both groaned because we were pretty confident that it would be a poor remake of the original series – what a terrible title!

Anyway, as there was only a choice of two stations we hadn’t been to the video library lately we opted for TNG. Of course we were hooked and subsequently watched together the other seasons of TNG and then in future years all the other spin offs.

Radio

Radio was a constant companion to Trenna whenever she was alone in the apartment, but when I was there she usually preferred it to be off.

I know she listened to a good dose of national current affairs. But she also listened to Triple J a lot. As it turned out that was a pretty good era for contemporary music, and it was also a great period in Triple J’s history in terms of intelligent, engaging presenters.

And of course the other thing she did was perfect her home computer skills (home PCs were still quite rare) and write long descriptive and entertaining letters to everyone we knew back in Perth.

Wine

When we moved to Darwin we were already members of The Wine Society. As the average person didn’t have access to the internet all correspondence was by mail.

You would receive a newsletter, scratch your head about what it all means, and then fill out and post a form to order their recommended crate of mixed red and white wines. There were some excellent wines in those boxes.

When I went to put my first order in from Darwin I got a letter back saying that they would not send wine to Darwin as the weather was unsuitable for cellaring. Snobs!

Not to worry, Darwin had no shortage of bottle shops, and I had also brought up with us several nice bottles of wine from Perth.

About a year into our stay in Darwin we were invited over to our friend Neil Perry’s house for dinner to mark his 50th birthday. I took one of the special wines I had brought up to Darwin when we had moved.

Well, it turns out The Wine Society weren’t snobs, they were right! I estimate that in the year I had it in Darwin that wine aged about 10 years. It was well and truely over the hill by the time Neil pulled the cork.

The Monster Lurking in the Wardrobe

All sorts of things spoiled easily in Darwin.

There was one June day, in The Dry, when it was remarkably cool. The temperature was probably in the mid 20s. Trenna had track pants and a windcheater on, and I uncharacteristically for Darwin, had a shirt on.

“Hey! Why don’t we have toasted sandwiches for lunch” said Trenna.

“Good idea”, I replied. “I’ll go and find the electric toasted sandwich maker.”

“It’s in the wardrobe in the spare room” called Trenna as I headed in that direction.

Trenna noticed me, a minute or two later, emerging from the spare room, ashen faced.

“What’s wrong” she said.

And then her eyes followed mine down to my right hand. She later described it to a friend…

"Greg was holding something just with his finger and thumb.  I couldn't figure out what it was.  It was sort of round, about the size of a volley ball.  But it was a sort of light greeny blue colour, it was furry, and it had this black tail.
"I thought he had found some sort of weird tropical animal, or perhaps some sort of insect nest.  It was weird!"

“What’s that thing?” Trenna asked me.

“Well, I THINK, it’s the toasted sandwich maker, but the left over grease on it has grown this amazing mould colony. It’s a ball of mould!”

“Yuck!”

“I’ll take it down stairs and put it in the bin, there.”

Neither Trenna or I liked sending items to landfill. I’ll often go to a lot of trouble to fix an appliance that has broken. A quick scrub with detergent and warm water and the mould would have been gone.

But I knew that if I did that there was no way we would ever be able to get the image of the green furry volley ball out of our mind whenever we tried to get stuck into a toastie.

Getting Out

Darwin is a wonderful place to visit. I have no hesitation in recommending it as a tourist destination.

However, based on our mid 1990s experience, I just couldn’t recommend it as a place to live (unless perhaps you are a Victorian or a Taswegian).

Eventually the place wore us down and after about 18 months I started very diligently applying for jobs at other universities. We were so keen we were prepared to apply for a job anywhere.

Anywhere but Darwin.

So for at least a few months Trenna and I spent a lot of our time applying for jobs for me. Addressing the selection criteria often took seven or eight pages, plus a CV of another three or four pages.

Trenna now had a new job – proof reader. It must have been hard with her poor eyesight and the glary Darwin conditions but she was very, very good at it.

Our joint diligence did eventually lead to a job offer at a university in Perth. And Trenna was over the moon.

So, as she quite often put it:

"We eventually left Darwin after Two years, Two months, Two days, TOO LONG!"

---