Darwin has more sky per capita than any other Australian capital city. And boy, do we know how to use it.

Every night of the year there’s a post card sunset, and six months of the year there’s a lightning display that stretches over the entire horizon. 1 night a year is dedicated to blowing things up and filling the sky with colours, celebrations and other people’s letterboxes, all in celebration of self-government and the fact that there’s absolutely nothing Adelaide can do about it.

I took my wife for a walk out along the east point foreshore on cracker night We’ve only been married for a couple of months, and it was her first cracker night. I spent most of the walk reassuring her that it was all perfectly safe and that the sky rockets whizzing overhead and around our ankles really weren’t anything to worry about. In order to distract her I suggested we could wander over and look at the impressive bonfire someone had managed to build. It turned out to just be an entire tree that was on fire, so that didn’t really help.

And every night of the year we have the possibility of spotting another mysterious light in the sky. The NT is the UFO spotting centre of Australia. There are more UFO sightings here than anywhere else. Certainly  the most per capita. This may well be linked with the NT’s other great claim to fame which that we consume more alcohol per capita than any other state. And in a country that’s right up there in world lists of alcohol consumption that’s something to be either horrified about or proud of, depending on your ideology and whether or not it was your letterbox that got blown up.

The fact that most of these remote area UFO sightings occur within a couple of hundred kilometres of Tindal Air Base is, of course, irrelevant. We’re a bunch of drunken stargazers and that’s all there is to it.

The other contributing factor to visions of lights in the sky might just be mango madness. Now this is a serious issue. A recent study conducted at our very own Charles Darwin University has concluded that that increases in heat and humidity are liked with higher levels of stress, irritability and low energy. It’s science.

I’m considering lodging my own application for a research grant to study the effect to which excessive consumption of alcohol can be linked with karaoke and falling over. I’m serious about this. I’ve put together a plan for a longitudinal study over a number of years. I’m confident I’ll be able to generate substantial interest, with plenty of volunteer test subjects. I’m less confident in our ability to come up with a control group, which would need to consist of non-drinkers who do karaoke and fall over, which may prove more of a logistical challenge. Perhaps I’d better leave the research up to the experts.

The other thing you’ve got to watch out for in the skies above Darwin is the occasional cyclone of course. Darwin is infamous for both the number of cyclones we get and for the extent that we don’t care. Personally I think this is a little unfair on both counts. Firstly, the NT actually gets fewer cyclones each year than either Western Australia or Queensland. It just so happens that the cyclones those states get strike so far away from the capital cities that no-one gives a hoot. A category 5 could rip the roofs off Townsville and the first thing Brisbane would know about it would be a coronial enquiry into why bananas are suddenly so much more expensive.

Not here! If there’s so much as a hint that a low in the gulf might have the potential to manage a category 1 some time next week, you can bet your iced coffee it’ll make the front page of the NT News the next day.

And what do Territorians do about it? Well there are a few different ways Territorians react. Newly minted residents, fresh from their first government posting or mining adventure, will invariably panic shop, purchasing bottled water, gas stoves, canned goods, radio batteries and radios, as prescribed by your friendly government emergency plan advice, and leaving rows and rows of bare shelves at the supermarket. Seasoned Territorians wait until Cyclone Watch is called, and then they also panic buy, leaving rows and rows bare shelves at the bottle-o. And on the off chance that we make it through the storm (or even just make it through the weekend) without the power going off, we’ll just grab a TV guide from the newsagent on the way out.

Not that there’s anything good on TV these days. It’s all just reality television and football. An alarming statistic from the university of Katherine has recently concluded that that the Northern Territory has more eviction specials per capita than any other place in the universe.

Okay, I made that on up, but the thing is, here in Darwin we have more of just about everything per capita than anywhere else, because there’s only two hundred thousand of us to begin with. It only takes a room full of three hundred people to get bored at a gala dinner, and suddenly we have more Sudoku players per capita than anywhere in the world. It’s handy. I’m certainly claiming the most web traffic per capita of anyone else in my house at the moment. And I’m aware that that doesn’t make sense. But that’s okay, This website is famous among hamsters of the world for making less sense per capita than any other website in the southern hemisphere.

I shouldn’t be blogging before my morning coffee. I don’t drink coffee, but that’s not important. I’m just going to stop now.

Garry with 2 Rs

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