Even in this dry season, with its generous parks and open space browned off by months without rain, Darwin is a picture to behold. Looking out over the Arafura Sea, towards an Asia that increasingly is its natural economic fit and bathed in unfailing 30-degree temperatures and azure skies, Australia's most northern capital projects a calm nonchalance, a sort of manana without the sense of urgency, an ideal antidote to the rip and rush of southern life.
It's a picture that belies reality, however. The Northern Territory, and particularly its capital, is being asked to make its most dramatic shift since cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974.
The lifestyle for which so many Darwinites chose to eschew points south and to take up residence remote from family, friends and past is under challenge by resource-mania, a headlong rush to grab some of the spoils lavished for decades on the neighbours to the west and the east - Western Australia and Queensland.
A $34 billion investment is in progress to pump gas condensate 885 kilometres from the Browse Basin off the Kimberley coast to Darwin, where it can be converted to liquefied natural gas (LNG) for shipping to Japan. The Ichthys project, by its Japanese owner Inpex, comes on top of the existing ConocoPhillips onshore processing of gas from the Timor Sea, and is the heftiest addition to a grand plan to make Darwin a rival to the North West Shelf as a gas hub. For all of Darwin's false starts, for all the hype over three decades, that Darwin was about to score a future beyond the roles of northern administrator and defence bulwark (it's biggest employers), Darwin's time in the economic glow of what Australia does best may eventually have arrived.
Darwin incomes have a healthy premium above the national average but housing affordability is every bit the nightmare of Sydney and other costs of living reflect its isolation and lack of competition.
Chris Delaney shifted from Melbourne for two years to practise law and for his wife, Lynette, to teach. That was 22 years ago. A Vietnam veteran who serves in Norforce, a mostly Aboriginal reservist outfit, he argues appalling indigenous living conditions will remain while education in remote communities sticks with priorities not sensitive to cultural need. But his experience is positive. "My wife describes it as a Victorian country town with palm trees. It's got a vibrant social life, emphasising the outdoors, and it's a great place to raise kids,'' he says.
"A dining experience here used to be a lump of steak, but international cuisine influences are now everywhere." Darwin has 56 nationalities. It's where the first boat people arrived and where many asylum seekers are incarcerated, and it was the destination for many fleeing East Timorese. Perhaps Barack Obama's visit to Darwin last November, when he saluted the arrival of the first of 2500 US marines, aroused a sense of Darwin's national significance. Or perhaps it was the summit last month with the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who joked Darwin was a fitting venue given that most Indonesians' impression of Australia was formed watching Crocodile Dundee.
