My kids have unsurprisingly never left the country.
I hadn’t at their ages either, but as someone who started travelling abroad as soon as I was an adult and has seen a bit of what lies beyond Australian soil, I was keen to take them on an overseas adventure this year to give them a bit of a culture shock.
As fate would have it, at the time of booking the holiday, there were still a few COVID-19 rules in place for international travel that didn’t really work for our family, so we started to look within Australia for a destination that would still offer that culture shock, but also provide a warm escape from this cold Victorian winter.
We settled on the Northern Territory, flying into Darwin and road-tripping south from there to loop back around to the capital.
Same country, different climate, different flora, different (and more terrifying) fauna.
Same country, different lifestyle, different rules, different state. In fact, not a state at all, rather a territory that was granted self-governance from the Commonwealth Government in 1978.
Unbeknownst to me before our trip, Territorians celebrate this day of independence on July 1 every year, which coincidentally happened to be our first day there and one of only a couple we were spending in Darwin itself.
We picked up our hire car and as we toured the city we saw advertisements on signs, posters and banners along fences for ‘one-day only’ fireworks sales.
I don’t know what kind of store would be most likely to sell fireworks (probably stores dedicated wholly and solely to that if they were legal year-round, of which there were many in the NT), but tool shops and supermarkets were even selling them.
It turns out you’re allowed to buy fireworks between 9am and 9pm in the NT on Territory Day and you’re allowed to detonate them yourself, without any explosives safety training, so long as you’re over 12 years of age (and supervised if under 18), between the hours of 6pm and 11pm that same day in private and public spaces (so long as you’re not at a Territory Day community event).
Wild!
As we drove and wandered around the city, there were signs advising of fireworks exclusion zones, which I, of course, as a Victorian found so unfamiliar that I photographed them with a dropped jaw like the tourist I was.
We wound up at the largest community event in the Top End — the Mindil Beach festivities — watching Joe Camilleri and The Black Sorrows grace the stage, where a backdrop of fireworks detonated continually as far as the eye could see along the coastline in all directions.
It was insane.
Pretty, yes, but so untamed.
And then, as we drove away weaving through the suburbs, full of adrenaline, faces plastered with wide grins and shaking our heads in some mixture of awe and disbelief over what we’d just witnessed, we saw the real face of firecracker night.
It was people setting off fireworks on footpaths, letterboxes, roads, in grasslands, where grass fires had begun to rage out of control before a fire crew could douse the flames because they were busy attending one of the other 100 incidents they were called to that night.
In one such incident, a 23-year-old lost his arm when the steel pipe he and his father were launching fire crackers from broke, while shrapnel impaled his dad’s groin.
One news outlet reported there were six serious injuries on the night; thankfully, no deaths this year.
Ever so casually, government sites offer handy tips on staying safe: ensure ignition sites are clear of flammables, such as mulch and dry grass; light one cracker at a time; have a hose or bucket of water at the ready; wet down debris after use.
But when fireworks are named things like Bad Neighbour, Hell Fire, Little Angries and Earthquake Multishot, do they even fit in the same sentence as safety?
We drove 20 minutes away from the main activity to our accommodation in the suburb of Durack.
It’s somewhere that seemed as if it would ordinarily be quite a peaceful neighbourhood, but I had to swerve around empty firework canisters strewn all over the roads, and try as we might to get to sleep that night — even after the 11pm cut-off time — there was no hope, with a loud bang every few seconds; some that sounded like they were being fired from our very roof.
I didn’t purposely plan for us to be in Darwin on Territory Day, but I did deliberately try to find a culture shock for the kids with this holiday.
Turns out they got it on day one, and, to my surprise, so did I.
Our Top End adventure started with one hell of a bang.
And then several more.
Bang, bang. Bang-bang, bang.
Absolute madness in the best and worst way.