MAKING A NEW DARWIN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 28 December 1942, Page 1

MAKING A NEW DARWIN

END OF AN EYESORE SQUALID CHINATOWN GONE Somewhere in Auntralia: After more than 70 years of inglorious existence Darwin’s famous Chinatown is no more (writes Axel Olsen, “Argus” War Correspondent). Known to anyone who was ever in Darwin as one of the most squalid and filthy collection of buildings anywhere in Australia, it is now a mass of broken timber, iron, and rubbish. Soon it will be as clear as it was before j the first ramshackle house began to afflict the landscape. The change has been wrought by the Army, which in recent months has done a remarkable job in clearing Darwin j township of rubbish and bomb debris. I The clean up was aimed primarily at checking the increase of flies and mosquitoes, and thus preventing the posj sibility • t an outbreak of disease, but the ultimate effect on the town will be j splendid. The Army has achieved in a few months what would in normal times have taken years of abortive I wrangling, and, for anyone who dislikes j slums, there is no more satisfying ex i perience than to wander through what i was once Darwin’s Chinese quarter. Its ancient buildings of corrugated iron and wood had grown bit by bit j with the increasing prosperity of their ' owners, and housed dozens of Chinese ' families. Chinatown w r as the centre of the town’s many gambling dens, where any night and nearly all day you could I win or lose large sums of money at “ms and outs,” a modified form of roulette. The gambling dens were open to everybody except the police, and at night around dozens of tables crowded men of all nationalities —Southern Europeans, Malayan half-castes, Scandinavians, Chinese, whites and off-whites—all staring through the hot, smoky glare while the "spinner” rolled the dice and Chinese banker handed out winnings. The scene was an exaggerated version of a Hollywood “gambling hell.” More discreetly, behind closed doors, Chinese and whites played other gambling games for huge sums.

The dim and dusty shops offered for sale camphorwood chests, patent medicines, Chinese silks and linens, groceries, Malayan carved wood masks, vegetables : and curios. Several shops did an un- ! ceasing business in nothing but lemon squash drinks. In the eating houses, j with such quaint and misleading names as ‘The Cafe de Appetite," “Zero in the Tropics,” soldiers, wharf labourers, civil | servants, and sailors fought an unending battle with swarms of flies. In the street, with its foul gutters, sturdy Chinese I children laughed and played, while under the famous banyan tree men ejected from hotels when the bars closed at

10 p.m. caroused until they fell asleep. The banyan tree is all that remains of the glory that was Chinatown. WHERE REVELRY REIGNED The hotel in Chinatown, with its unbelievably rowdy bar. has lost its veri andah and all its windows and has a gaping hole in the front wall where a Japanese bomb hit it. In the bai, where men have been known to fight for more than an hour, where bottles hurtled overhead at frequent intervals, where, i in the days of beer glass shortage, a ; drinker took off his boot and I ad it ; filled with beer: where, when the beer supply failed, the hotel’s entire stock. ; including expensive liqueurs and i French champagne, was drunk in record time, all is now quiet and deserted. . with the swinging bar doors hiding a

ene of desolation That bar and those swinging doors did not belong to this century.

Elsewhere in the town a similar cleanup has been going on. and the improvej ment is a very pointed lead to what : could and should be done after the war. Overseas air travellers in peacetime used to be shown Darwin with an apologetic and shame faced assurance that the rest of Australia was not at all . like that; but such places as Chinatown ' made even the most optimistic and credulous visitor a little doubtful of the future. In the post-war years, with the inevitable development of air travel, Darwin will become more and more important as Australia’s first port of call, and if we are to encourage people to buy our goods a little window dressing would not be amiss. A prospective customer is not encouraged by being told. "Sorry, we know the goods in the window look terrible and smell pretty badly, but come inside. We’ve got some at the back of the shop that don’t smell at all."

Darwin has a lot of natural beauty. Its rambling harbour, its poinciana trees, masses of tethered fire against a blue-green sea, its sun-soaked sky with clouds white as a soap advertisement, would make an ideal setting for a model tropic town. As a tourist centre it has endless possibilities. The Army, in pulling down the hovels of Chinatown, has taken the first step toward the new Darwin. It is the job of the civilians who return north after the war to continue the good work.