Nature, cultures and snouts in the trough

Walking along the Esplanade early yesterday morning, I heard a barking owl in the bush behind Lameroo cliffs.
And then I saw it in the gloom, perched on a branch and repeating its cry: woof woof.
I'm not kidding.
That's why they're called barking owls.
Underneath the trees, orange-footed scrub fowl witter about like avian extras in a Monty Python movie.
This is little more than 100m from a large international hotel, a cocooned and air-conditioned haven that protects the moderately well-off visitor from the world around them; from the world they travelled thousands of kilometres to experience.
It may well be a sign that nature is holding its own in our city.
But for how long?
Cranes are on the skyline, big holes are in the ground and the real estate agents are grinning voraciously.
Well might they.
They and their mates in the land development world, among them the unbelievably wealthy Sultan of Brunei, have transformed Darwin with a plethora of apartment buildings.
Now, the population ain't growing and I'm not sure who's buying them, or more importantly living in them, but there's another new building every time you turn around, it seems.
So there has to be a heap of money in it.
For the few.
Last month the Government sponsored a planning forum to 'develop a vision for Darwin'.
Nice idea.
But it's about 20 years too late.
What Darwin used to be is gone.
It's been ripped up and knocked flat, to be replaced by a collection of buildings of neither wit nor style and without a shred of environmental sensibility.
In other words they're not just ugly; they don't take advantage of the balmy breezes above Darwin Harbour and their reliance on airconditioning makes them energy-expensive.
So I think the exercise is called 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.
The planning forum was attended by invited stakeholders - the industry and government - only.
It seems that the people - the ones who work, live or shop in the city, even (or especially) the people who sleep in the parks - don't really count.
True, there was a public forum late in the day.
The people of Darwin were allowed to ask four questions.
Meanwhile the people whose snouts have always been in the trough have got carte blanche to keep them there.
And get rich in the process.
I'm not just worried about this on aesthetic grounds.
The people who get invited to planning forums of this nature will tell you that the kind of development we will continue to experience is necessary to give Darwin a proper image to cater for visitors, people from overseas and interstate, and investors.
In other words you take a place that has its own unique attraction and turn it into an andoyne replica of everywhere else in the world.
Meretricious kitsch (probably a tautology) replaces the real and the lived-in.
Welcome to the new Singapore.
It seems to me that it also involves a more or less deliberate attempt to obliterate history, culture and a sense of place.
There is no place for these in the airbrushed, sanitised vision of who we are and where we live.
There is no place for tangible reminders of Darwin's history, like blackfellas freely wandering the streets as if they owned the place.
Well, some of them - Larrakia people - do, actually.
But the 'antisocial behaviour' of some - living their lives in public places - makes them all unwelcome.
There is still an Aboriginal town, a black skin, underpinning the white town that tourists and transient whitefella residents think is the real Darwin.
Aboriginal people - some from Larrakia families, others from all parts of the Territory and many of them from the Stolen Generations - don't just live and work here.
They are a network that supports the greater part of the city's sporting, social and cultural life
If the transient whitefellas can't see this and don't know about it, however, it doesn't exist.
For the time being, the black town is still there.
But, like the barking owl and the scrub fowl, I wonder for how much longer.
It's an inconvenient intrusion on the seamless vision of a brave new world of pastel-coloured buildings and and clean, happy punters with their soy lattes and dhukka on pide.
Where I live in the Northern Suburbs, I walk my dogs in the early dawn along a beach that is washed by the Timor Sea.
Within coo-ee of the University, the hospital and Darwin's only big shopping mall, Aboriginal people are camped on the beach under the casuarina trees.
Fires are smouldering.
The sand is littered with shellfish - clams and long bums.
As it has been for thousands of years.
Here at least there will be none of the development that has poxed the city.
The coastal reserve protects mangrove swamp, paperbarks, remnant monsoon vine forest and tropical woodland, replete with pandanus - all behind the dunes - as it shelters the people who use it is a temporary home..
If you're lucky, some mornings you'll see white-breasted sea eagles and osprey or curlews, whimbrels and dotterels.
In the monsoon forest you might catch a glimpse of the azure flash that is a rainbow pitta's wing panel.
Or on the boardwalk through the mangroves you'll catch the fleeting edge of a threat from a fiddler crab's waving claw as it disappears down its hole in the mud.
I hope it will still be there when my children are old.
And it should be, as long as the smart money doesn't find it.