Molly’s made her pilgrimage to this untouchable dress twice a week for the past four weeks, but, no matter how many times she wills a different outcome, her pockets are empty when she gets there, and she always turns away empty handed.
She walks barefoot. She dreams and Darwin dreams with her. It refuses to wake up, so the strange daily film-reel dream of the town on the geographical top of Australia during World War II unspools in all its scenes that make no sense. Darwin, which was not made by God but by a theory of evolution. Made by the earth spinning and by 5800 people who lost their footing, slid southwards and northwards on the rocking floors of ships with no anchors, and found the wreckage and flotsam of their lives washed ashore at Port Darwin. Greek and Italian storeowners, Chinese market sellers, Japanese divers, Filipino fishermen, German miners, Afghan cameleers, Thai whores, Malay traders, Javanese labourers, New Guinea labourers, South Sea island labourers press-ganged onto boats and forced to work inside the Darwin dream. A dream that starts in the Timor Sea on a sheet of turquoise coastal water so clear you feel you could dance on its hard glass. A girl like Molly Hook could make slippers out of that sea glass and she could wear them to a Country Women’s Association ball with a sky-blue satin shop-window dress.
Those mangroves on the shore would be no place to dance. The mangroves belong to the bodies of root-wedged dead gangsters and the crocodiles who feast on their sins. But inside that mangrove fringe is a place where humans come to re-invent themselves. A place to change your dream, to change your name, to change your ending. Baumgarten to Maze. Molly to Marlene. Nobody knows anything and everybody keeps it that way. Don’t trouble the man in the black hat three stools down along the bloodstained bar of the National Hotel; he’s the devil on a day off.
The Darwin sunset is gold then red then purple then black. The town is corrugated-iron fortress homes that fall with a sneeze. Dirt for roads and dirt for air. Cyclone-ravaged for a century. Architectural impermanence. Darwin dreams in sungolds and earth-browns. It dreams in violent rain and wind. ‘Nungalinya,’ Sam Greenway once told Molly Hook. That’s the Dreamtime ancestor in charge of the cyclones and storms that tear the tin skin off town pubs and stores with a single whistle from His lips. Sam said Nungalinya is angry at all the white settlers who keep landing in Port Darwin, keep skipping ashore with their pickaxes and shovels to chip away at Ol’ Man Rock. Nungalinya, Sam said, lifts fishing boats from the sea, sucks them into the air and bats them a hundred yards through the wind against shore rocks that smash metal hulls the same way all those white settlers smash the shells of fat-clawed East Point mud crabs.
The Darwin dream has a smell and it smells like the maggots eating all those discarded crab claws. It smells like all the cut ends of vegetables left to rot in Chinatown bins that dingoes and lost dogs tip over after dark. Darwin dreams in drink and sweat. Warm beer and toil. Fat-bellied fist fighters and men who piss in buckets beneath their bar stools. Empty car bodies left abandoned in the streets outside town by empty men who shot themselves dead inside them. It’s frontier territory where nothing stays nailed down. America’s Wild West all the way down here in Australia’s wild north. Some came by boat and some just emerged from the dust; they crawled out of the dirt and dusted off their shoulders and staggered into the Victoria Hotel on Smith Street for three shots of black rum then a glass of water. Darwin dreams in dinner dances and woodchopping contests and travelling freak show tents where Sydney wolf boys and Melbourne pig girls reel in horror at the ticket-buying Darwin locals staring at them through the glass.
Van Diemen Gulf and Snake Bay to the north. South Alligator River to the east, the Rum Jungle to the south. And beyond it all, the vast ancient wetlands and wilderness of Molly Hook’s wild dreams, the prehistoric stone and vine country. The deep country. Suffocating monsoon forests and tidal flats and jagged plateaus and rock formations that tower over the city buildings of the London and New York and Paris in Molly’s head.
Giant tree rats just on the outskirts of town. Killer snakes beneath your bed. Killer spiders crawling up your trouser legs. Here are Japanese pearling crews tying down rickety luggers in Darwin Harbour. Here are Christian missionaries instructing Aboriginal servants, whose families once sang on the land where they now dust down church pews. Drunk and wealthy cattlemen and their mistresses skinny-dipping in the voluminous water tanks of the abandoned Vestey’s meatworks at Bullocky Point. Sunburnt stockmen clocked off and rolling dice in a Mitchell Street gambling hall. There are hardly any cars on the street: most
