I ran into a little trouble with souvenir trains transferring my luggage from the train to the hotel in Darwin. I packed them carefully but each time I moved my bag or searched for something, one of the trains would start up chuff, chuffing down an imaginary track (whoo whoo). It happened putting my bags on the bus which took passengers from the train, and again checking into the hotel. I started worrying that it might happen when the bags were loaded onto a plane somewhere and I’d be charged with terrorism. So I took the noise producing mechanism out and kept it in my handbag. Every time my phone rang, or I needed to pay for something, off would go the train. Eventually I borrowed a Phillips screwdriver and took the batteries out.

About half an hour before we pulled into Darwin, I went to have a final chat with Norm. He looked unhappy; I had probably hurt his feelings the day before when I insisted on being alone. I asked him what he was going to do in Darwin and he told me he was looking up his mates for a last get-together. I realised he was probably dying from his lung problems. He looked so forlorn and I felt so guilty. I was also glad to be free of him.

My first day in Darwin I took a walk in a park where I could take pictures of Darwin harbour. There were army ships and working ships and some leisure ships. Then I waited outside the hotel for a bus called the Tour Tub. It’s an open-sided bus which drives a circuit around the major tourist sites in Darwin, allowing passengers on and off at various sites. It completes the circuit in an hour so you can get on and off till you’ve seen everything you want to see. Norm had suggested it and I thought I could probably take a nice drive around Darwin and maybe look around one place more closely. As the Tour Tub rolled up, there was Norm sitting up front next to the driver. I don’t know how many times he rode the Tub waiting for me. At least I didn’t feel guilty about leaving him on the train anymore.

Norm followed me off the bus when I went to look at WWII oil storage tunnels. He was fascinated by WWII and thought this was a good choice. The tunnels were meant to be used to store oil for the planes, because the Japanese kept bombing the above ground storage depots. They were never used because the war finished about the same time as building finished on the tunnels. Norm and I talked about the war as we walked through. I told him about my mother and the Nazis in Hungary and he told me that at the NSW-QLD-SA border they hadn’t really known it was happening. One old geezer on the station, when he was asked if he was glad the war had ended, thought they were talking about the Boer War.

When we came back out, Norm chatted to the tunnel hostess while I climbed the stairs to take photos of the courthouse and the bougainvillea. I met another couple from the train and we talked about how nice it was to not be bouncing around all the time, especially when backing on to the toilet seat. We walked around together for a while and seemed to be getting on till I mentioned that when I got to Cairns I was going to relax and sit on my arse by the pool. While the husband laughed, this proved too risqué for the wife who promptly decided I was not the right type to be hanging out with. She lead the way downstairs to the bus at high speed, checking occasionally that husband was following.

As we boarded the bus, the tunnel hostess said goodbye to Norm and referred to me as his lady friend. I realised at that point why Norm was following me; he wanted to be seen around Darwin with a younger woman on his arm. He was a sweet man, and probably dying, so I wanted to oblige him, but I was there for my own reasons and had my own plans. I gave him another hour on the Tour Tub bus. We drove around listening to the driver talk about Darwin being bombed 64 times during WWII and then being destroyed by Cyclone Tracey in 1974. Only the hotel where I was staying was left standing.

Norm invited me to lunch as we came back to the centre of Darwin but I told him I had things to do before my afternoon tour. He seemed to accept it and when I asked him what he was planning to do, he mentioned looking up his friends, if any were still alive, and going out to watch them drink.

My afternoon tour was feeding the crocodiles who live in the Adelaide River. The bus drove out of Darwin into landscape that looked quite similar to that in NSW. It looked lush, especially when it started raining. We drove through wetlands and saw ibises, magpie geese and little birds walking on lily ponds. I photographed a cormorant sitting on a bush but couldn’t get a good photo of the water buffalo as we drove by. I’m not sure I could tell them from the Brahman cattle anyway. They all seemed to have humps.

At the river, we boarded a small boat and motored out to the middle where each crocodile has its feeding territory. The tour hostess referred to them each by name and collectively as snapping handbags. She hung steaks on the end of a pole and lowered them over the side where the crocodiles had been trained to jump out and grab them.

We were told that elbows and body parts should remain within the boat, lest the crocodiles were tempted to try for something more substantial than a piece of steak. Apparently people are too big for crocodiles to eat all at once, so they stash the spare meat under a log somewhere. I sat in the middle of the boat.

Next morning, I left early to catch the plane to Nhulunbuy in Gove where my friend Jenny lives. The taxi driver was a freelance cameraman who had lived and worked in the Territory for a while, so I asked him his thoughts on Howard’s response to the Little Children are Sacred report. Blacks hate whites, he told me, because their parents teach them to. He also told me that in Gove they would probably hate the alcohol ban, because it meant you couldn’t have a tinny on the beach anymore.