We visited the Aviation Museum. Very impressive. The building was used to store explosives for the war. I was expecting everything to be about the bombing of Darwin but it was so much more than that. There was a love area set aside for the pioneer women aviators.   Really nice to see. It is from Darwin that Amelia Earhart departed in 1937 before disappearing 2 days later east of Papua New Guinea.

There was a little bit about Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. He was of interest to me as he was someone my great uncle knew. Smithy (as my great uncle called him) and Charles Ulm landed in Darwin during their record breaking flight around Australia in 1927. It took them 10 days. Just 3 years later Smithy on the 19^th October beat Hinkler’s record for the fastest solo flight from England to Australia. The following year Smithy along with Ulm started the first all Australian mail run from Australia to England and return. The first flight took 64 day and was classified as a “saga of misfortune.”

Of course there was a lot of items about the war as it has played such a big part in shaping the city. Two and a half times more bombs were dropped on Darwin on 19 February than were dropped on Pearl Harbor.   An interesting side note of the bombing is the day after the bombing over £300,000 in notes and coins was evacuated. The money were given a ‘freedom of the road’ pass along with a three-ton truck and ordered to Alice Springs.

I am not into planes but I enjoyed the museum.