Cirrus@Austlit

'As an immensely readable, well-researched and passionately engaged account of Darwin, Tess Lea's biography of a city might be expected to invite speculation about the challenges of neo-tropical urbanism. Her fine decision to present Darwin's history, people, cultures and environments through a suite of loosely grouped stories demonstrates the proposition that 'Darwin' does not exist as an urban centre with critical or historical mass to generate its own story. It is a con-centration or distribution of suburbs defined by two major edges: the coast and the military landing strip (qua airport). In planning terms, it is a constellation of residential grids and star forms whose essential gravitational pull is expansionist. The recent plan to build a new satellite town up the harbour, irrational on any ordinary principles of town planning, attested to the fact that Darwin remains a pattern of landing strips, sites of temporary arrival and sojourn, always considered preliminary to further flight. The Weddell debacle was not a mysterious offspring of an anti-social spirit of place: as the creation of separated residential developments south of Heavitree Gap in Alice Springs demonstrates, it embodies an institutional incapacity to manage the growth of complexity. Lacking control, the Northern Territory government relishes control: simplification has the double effect of calculability and discouragement.' (Introduction)