I don’t remember seeing a color as full as the yellow of the sunset at Mindil Beach . You see it in this photo, made with a bad phone model among other things, and only slightly modified with Instagram filters. They look like fake colors, they are not. Mindil Beach, the beach of Darwin, in the Northern Territory . We are in the “Top End”, the Australian frontier place , the city of the tropics on the Timor Sea , the place where what we call “civilization” is a small place in a big world where nature commands, where to bathe there they are crocodiles and jellyfish and you should stay and watch.
The sunset of the sun here is a spectacle that enters the heart.
For at least three times in the nineteenth century the English tried to found a city up here, on top of the wild continent, in the land of the aboriginal population of the Larrakia, but all the outposts left in the hands of a handful of settlers did not last: too extreme to live here, even for pioneers. The first white community to live there permanently dates back to 1869, practically a breath of time ago. Then in 1974, at midnight on Christmas Eve, Darwin was literally swept away by Cyclone Tracy, The rest is made by crossing roads with new houses, a few shops, a few art galleries, and restaurants of various kinds (including souvlaki: the taxi driver shows them to me and says that I have to understand that everything I see here “is Greek gods”).
But already at that moment, as you walk the anonymous streets with the taxi, and in a completely unconscious way, there is something that begins to capture this place, an atmosphere. Something that tells you about the extreme border you had imagined. An absence of all that we are used to giving value that is transformed, step by step, into a powerful feeling of freedom . What then is what happens in Australia: it is useless to rationalize or explain, it is the energy of the earth that leads you back to it, it is the enormity of the space that enters your dreams and turns into a place of the soul.