And I would have liked it more had there been some distinctive tropical boulevard or bazaar to shop at instead of one of those tarted-up outdoor arcades that Australians like to refer to these days as a mall. In the coming months we would see malls going up (or gone up) all over Australia, many of them in the most unlikely or undesirable places of business. They were to become symbols for us of careless and contemptuous free-wheeling capitalism, the expressions – those in Queensland especially – of local political insolence, of vandalism initiated at the very highest level. But at least in Darwin’s case it wasn’t a State Premier or Chief Minister who had flattened the old town to put a mall through; Cyclone Tracy, with an effectiveness that must have made Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen go green with envy, did that in one single night of spectacular devastation on Christmas Eve, 1974. Thereafter Darwin had become a government town. And that was what I most disliked about Smith Street Mall – for all its attempts to be territorially harmonious, for all its cool enclosures and burgeoning tropical greenery, it felt like the sort of place that public servants from anywhere preferred to shop in. Its dinkiness and petty bourgeois homogeneity seemed specifically designed to lay to rest Darwin’s reputation for disorderliness. (‘The town is in the hands of Communists!’ W. M. Nairn, the Member for Perth, had proclaimed in 1931, after ‘Snowy’ Mahoney had waved the red flag.) It was a wilful refutation of the town’s wild character.