AustLit

While never residents per se, as long-term repeat visitors and thus 'fans' of Darwin in all its complex diversity it was a pleasure to once again be evocatively trans-ported there, if not literally then vicariously. Tess Lea's Darwin is a wonderful, if unusual book: equal parts local history and scholarly critique, exposé and confessional. On its back cover, the book is categorised as `travel/memoir'. It is those things, but also much more. There are tender touches and moments of quiet reflection, where one can almost feel the sand of Casuarina Beach under one's feet. And there are moments of sheer horror: Aboriginal massacres; children caught in violent cyclones, their bodies tom apart by flying bits of corrugated iron; gang rapes perpetrated on local teenagers by American soldiers. They are all a part of the story of this incredible, challenging locale. Darwin is really an (auto)biography: of a city, its people, its insects and its weather, and of a person with deep feelings and ambivalences for the place. The book has all the contradictions, fraught memories, traumas and emotions that come with the genre of autobiographical account, and that encapsulate Darwin, the city. (Introduction)