blame tracy

Walking around Darwin's city centre (which is more like a town centre by most Australian city standards), what struck me most about the buildings is that they are all so dated. Not old, exactly, but extremely un-modern. Just as I realised that all of these outdated buildings were reminiscent of roughly the same era, it hit me - the architecture is uniformly dated because it was all built at the same time. Or rather, rebuilt.


I think everyone in Australia knows at least a little about Cyclone Tracy. For those who are a bit hazy, here are the essential facts: It hit the city of Darwin at around midnight on Christmas Eve, 1974. By Christmas morning, approximately 70% of the city was destroyed, 48,000 people were homeless and 65 were dead. Following the immediate aftermath of the disastrous storm, then prime minister Gough Whitlam set up a commission with the task of rebuilding the city within five years (despite some calls for the entire city to be relocated).


While I haven't been able to verify my suspicion, it seems indisputably obvious that these buildings were a part of that immediate late-70s rebuilding process. All of the images here were taken in the city centre, and there were countless others in the same style.


The abundance of architecture from this period - concentrated within the very small CBD - gives Darwin proper a fascinating, almost forgotten feeling. It's as though they (and who's they exactly? The government? The Australian people? I don't know) frantically streamed money into the city in order to rebuild it as quickly as possible, and haven't been back since.

And that's probably not far off the truth.