HISTORIES OF RAPID CREEK

Rapid Creek is on Larrakia land. Their name for the area around the mouth of the creek is Gurumbai, which the signs say means ‘elbow’ referring to the bend in the river. ‘Elbow’ in other languages in the Top End is used to refer metaphorically to many articulating junctures between peoples, places, names, waters, and often sacred business, so there may be more to the Larrakia name than a simple bend in the river. Aboriginal people, owners and visitors have always felt welcome here on Larrakia terms. The Jesuit missionaries in the 1870s worked with Larrakia and Woolner people, as well as others from as far away as the Alligator and Daly Rivers. Tiwi people were employed by the Chinese market gardeners back in the 1930s. In the 1970s I recorded stories from old people at Milingimbi who had walked the 400 miles to Darwin before the war, just to see what was going on, to meet up with important ceremonial holders, and to reconnect and advance some sacred business. Today Yolŋu have their own names for the various sites, like the ‘50 cents’ rotunda at the edge of the Gurumbai elbow, but they are all keenly aware that Rapid Creek is on Larrakia land. The mouth of the creek looks north out to sea towards Dariba Nungalinya, the Old Man Rock, who protects the Larrakia land and people.

When HMS Beagle moored around Shoal Bay in 1839, the sailors came exploring west around Lee Point past the mouth of the creek. Arriving after dark, they scaled the cliffs with the help of a lantern, and subsequently named the land Night Cliff and the waters Beagle Bay. An alternative history has it that the area was originally named after a much loved public servant Mr John George Knight. A contributor to the NT News keeping the debate alive in 1952 demanded: ‘Who could show such disrespect to a faithful pioneer of the Territory?’ Its true name according to that history, is Knight Cliff.

In the 1870s, the Jesuits set up a mission on what is now the Millner side of Rapid Creek up near McMillans Rd. They found the local Aboriginal people ‘much more intellectually gifted than those of South Australia’, and ‘like the Alpine people of Europe – good-humoured, skinny-legged and tall’. Their Superior was Fr Donald Mackillop, less famous younger brother of Saint Mary Mackillop. Together with ‘fifty Aboriginal people and many children’ the Jesuits dug a well and planted tobacco, bananas, pineapple, and rice and raised and cared for horses. But the mission didn’t work out. There turned out to be a lot of fighting between Aboriginal groups, apparently because the Jesuits in dealing with people from other tribal groups failed to acknowledge the authority of the Larrakia owners upon whose land they had set up their mission. According to Fr Conrath, the last Superior before they moved to Daly River, the Rapid Creek mission ‘had a miserable existence from its beginning to its end’. They also abandoned the Daly River mission soon after. By the late 19th century, Rapid Creek was a celebrated picnic destination for those living in Palmerston – which is now called Darwin.

By the 1920s, there were three times as many Chinese people as Europeans in the Northern Territory, leading to pressure on the South Australian Government to extend the operation of the Chinese Restriction Act to the NT. In 1926, Fong Soong Lim (also known as Alexander) was born in the new town of Katherine to Chinese parents, both of whom had themselves been born in the NT. When they moved to Darwin the Lims had an interest in the market gardens near the mouth of the Rapid Creek. Alexander Fong Lim later became the Lord Mayor of Darwin – the lake at East Point is named after him. Tiwi Islanders worked there.

Long after the market gardens were gone from Rapid Creek, the Lim family’s interest continued in the legendary Lim’s Hotel where the Beachfront Hotel is today. I remember it as mostly concrete and mesh attracting people of all races and backgrounds to the weekly ‘Rage in the Cage,’ the likes of which I had never seen before nor have since. Darwin was still part of the international Hippie Trail back then and there were many motorcycle enthusiasts belonging to what are now called ‘outlawed gangs.’ Lim’s was the only hotel in Darwin, they used to say, where you had to wipe your feet on the way out. Nearly 100 years after the first Chinese market garden, and long since the end of Lim’s Hotel, there is still a vibrant weekly Asian market in Rapid Creek — the oldest markets in Darwin.

Up the top of the creek there is a swamp behind a weir and a high fence protecting an Australian Defence Force Explosive Ordnance Depot. The armed forces have had a strong presence in the area since the build up to the war. You can see the top of the swamp from Amy Johnson Drive, spectacular in the wet when the lilies bloom. Downstream from the weir is a beautiful quiet shady well-kept path on Airport land in an area called Yankee Pools. Yankees used to swim there during the war when hundreds of them were stationed at Night Cliff. All servicemen had been banned from the Coconut Grove after some of the lads had been harvesting coconuts with a machine gun so Yankee Pools would have been a pleasant alternative, an hour’s walk up the creek from the Nightcliff barracks. It’s still great for a swim for much of the year when it flows strongly, and just as cool and clear but shallower downstream both sides of McMillans Road.

In 1971 the Northern Territory Administration called for proposals for damming the creek at the sea, flooding the mangroves south of Trower Road, and providing over 600 housing lots around an 80 hectare ornamental-recreational lake. By the time tenders for the first stage of the project closed on Christmas Eve 1974, most of the mangroves in the area had already been bulldozed. By the following morning most of the remainder had been blown away by Cyclone Tracey. We never got the lake, but the eponymous Lakeside Drive remains as testament to the plan. The mangrove recovery was remarkable, and the diversity of species in the Rapid Creek forests is unusually large compared with other sites nationally and internationally. Within a few years a mangrove herbarium and botanical gardens were planned for the area.

That was in 1979 when the newly formed Northern Territory Government called for a Recreational Project Plan. The Corporation of the City of Darwin had proposed a ‘fair and circus ground’ south of McMillans Rd alongside the creek, and an area for ‘archers, guides, scouts, model planes, marching girls and a community garden’ along Lakeside Drive. We don’t have the marching girls, but we do have the community garden which is productive and much loved and about to be expanded and fenced off.

The Recreational Project Plan suggested three zones. Zone 1 was to be a ‘Mangrove Botanical Garden’ north of Trower Rd with two cycle paths through the mangroves – one from opposite Lim’s Hotel to the Darwin Community College (now CDU) and the other above the sewerage groyne closer to Trower Rd. Neither of these paths were built, but are still possible and a great idea. They could still happen. The Yellow Bridge at the mouth of the creek came 10 years later. The council is currently calling for community input to an upgrade of the Lakeside Drive area — more community gardens, better paths, fences, sealed parking areas, maybe a dog park. Have your say.

By 1979, Zone 2, between Trower and McMillans Roads, already had a large flat area of landfill which had been dumped in the mangroves. That area was proposed to become a ‘water park’ and in fact became the Water Gardens. The plan was to include, in recognition of the contribution of Chinese Territorians to Darwin life from way back, a walled Chinese garden with a moon gate. The garden and moon gate seem to have ended up on CDU campus and are very popular.

Parts of Zone 3, between McMillans Rd and up to Yankee Pools, is lined by beautiful satinash trees with red flaky bark, holding the banks together with their roots. The area in the Recreational Project Plan was meant to have cycle paths and an oval, none of which eventuated, which is fine by me. There is a new cycle path up there which goes for a short distance. I like its bushiness and the big grassy open areas up towards McMillans Rd with its big stands of pandanus and black wattles. The Yankee Pools area further up is beautiful with good solid pathways. In 2017 they have been planning to dig an enormous flood mitigation retention pond at the bottom of Zone 3 near McMillans Rd, but they have found toxic PFAS chemicals in the soil — probably from the airport — so they can’t remove any of the soil. They have gone back to the drawing board and hope to start digging again next year.

According to Parks and Wildlife, the Rapid Creek area attracts almost one million people every year. Bits of it are cared for by the Darwin International Airport, Parks and Wildlife, the City of Darwin Council, as well as the general public and interest groups like the Rapid Creek Landcare Group and the CDU Enviro Collective, both of which you could join. It is a local treasure, remarkably healthy, weed free, very diverse, full of birds, and not greatly threatened by overdevelopment. Larrakia water on Larrakia land. Always was, always will be.

Michael Christie works at Charles Darwin University and has lived in Darwin for many years.