This is Coast's biggest challenge ever.
We're traversing the oldest continental landmass on Earth...
Australia.
It's the sixth largest country in the world by size,
offering us an endless, unimaginable coastline
to discover incredible stories of history and intrigue.
We're taking you to magnificent cities, remote areas
never before seen from the air and meeting the people who have
chosen to hug their coastline like no other population on the planet...
This is a landscape that dwarfs humankind.
..and it has a history of equal magnitude,
dating back 50,000 years.
Yet its modern history is so young,
a new people discovering a land of immense potential
and unlimited beauty, on a scale that's hard to describe.
If you want to feel young and, frankly, reassuringly insignificant,
you should come here.
So for us, it's an epic journey full of wonder, surprise and fascination.
I've made it to the Top End, to the legendary Northern Territory.
It's home to a capital city that's been destroyed and rebuilt twice.
This is Australia's tropical frontier, its front door to Asia.
In fact, capital city Darwin is closer to Jakarta
than it is to Sydney.
History's merchants have plied their wares here since antiquity.
Macassans from the Spice Islands, the Chinese,
traded with the Saltwater people and then the colonists.
But the Northern Territory has no gentle tale of settlement.
With crocodiles for company in the warm waters
and crushing humidity above,
this is a coast that rewards the fearless and punishes the reckless.
Joining me on this extraordinary journey through the Top End,
Palaeontologist Professor Tim Flannery unearths
an uncomfortable truth.
It was this country that defeated the greatest empire
the world's ever seen, the British Empire.
There will be blood with Marine Biologist Dr Emma Johnston.
Miriam Corowa confirms that not all Hollywood dreams come true.
While it began with a million dollars,
it was really nowhere near enough.
And I relive the day the front line moved to Australia.
The attack has gone down in history as Australia's Pearl Harbour.
This is Coast Australia.
Our journey centres around Darwin,
heads to the coastal flood plains of the Adelaide River
and up to the pristine Cobourg Peninsula in the east.
In 1606, the Dutch had begun mapping the northern coastline
of what they called New Holland.
But they were well east of here,
in the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York.
It's generally accepted that the first Europeans to sail
into these waters were the crew of the HMS Beagle, under the command
of John Lort Stokes, who wrote admiringly
of the impressive location of the many-armed harbour.
In 1839, HMS Beagle came in here and the captain was so struck
by the natural beauty of the splendid harbour,
he decided to name it after a gifted young naturalist he'd sailed
with on previous trips - a chap by the name of Charles Darwin.
Ironically, Charles Darwin never actually visited
this part of Australia
and he would have had good grounds for being grateful for the fact,
because it was hellish to settle.
The British tried and failed on three separate occasions.
Eventually, 30 years after the Beagle's visit,
a fourth attempt... and this time, success!
The state of South Australia, which governed this region,
sent a surveyor up here to establish a settlement,
a dynamo of a man called George Goyder.
Goyder was nicknamed Little Energy, and he was so tenacious,
he quickly established this camp and ensured it was sustainable.
As Goyder built his camp right here on the coast,
two extraordinary engineering projects were under way.
First, an Overland Telegraph Line that spanned the continent
from Adelaide to Darwin,
3,200km across some of the harshest country on Earth...
..linking up to this the long distance undersea cable.
Now, it might not look like much today,
but when this cable arrived here 150 years ago, it was a huge event.
This revolutionised Australia.
It provided a direct link back to Britain
and near-instantaneous communication with the rest of the world.
Laid on the seabed, the submarine cable snaked 2,000km
to connect Darwin and Java
and then onto Jakarta, Singapore, Europe and London...
a true feat of engineering excellence.
Goyder's camp and the founding of Darwin
was a triumph of endurance rather than inspiration.
This tropical strength coastline defeated the British time and again
and particularly harshly in the Cobourg Peninsula,
a historical moment that has long intrigued
Palaeontologist Professor Tim Flannery.
I've just arrived on the Cobourg Peninsula.
It's about 300km north-east of Darwin and about as far north
as you can get in Australia's Top End.
And for as long I can remember, I've really wanted to come here
because about 25km to the east of here,
a chapter in Australia's history unfolded that I think is
one of the most extraordinary in the whole history of the continent.
Oh, Alan, is it? Good morning. How are you, Tim? Good morning.
Glad to see you. Pleased to meet you, mate.
'It's certainly remote.
'In the early 19th century, this was the frontier for European
'settlement in Australia's north.'
A tantalising prospect for any explorer.
Even today access is limited,
to boat or plane in the wet season,
'or one long dirt road in the dry,
'ensuring that something of the severely mythic
'still attaches to this tropical place.'
'This beach looks as untouched by the human hand
'as any place I've ever seen.'
But there are hints here of a different history.
The people who cut this block of iron stone 180 years ago
thought they were laying the foundations
for one of the world's great trade cities.
They were fantastic optimists
and they named the place after their young queen, Victoria.
I'm keen to find out why the Victoria Settlement,
which became known as Port Essington, was conceived
with such enthusiasm and confidence,
yet within a few short years
had been abandoned as a bitter failure.
This was the site of British attempts to, in effect,
ring-fence the nascent colony.
Paranoid about a French foothold,
Victoria was first about defence and then trade,
a desire to break into the lucrative trepang
or sea cucumber market with Asia.
Wow. This is my first sight of the Victoria Settlement.
And already I can see why people had trouble surviving here.
Just look at that chimney on the married men's quarters
here on the outskirts of the settlement.
That must have taken a huge amount of effort to build,
it's absolutely solid. You look at it here...
there's probably a few weeks' work gone into building this,
cutting the stone..
shaping the fireplace and all of the energy you put into doing this,
in a climate where all you need is an open fire 364 days a year,
is energy you don't have for other things.
History Professor Alan Powell has written extensively
about the maritime record of northern Australia.
Ah, Alan Powell, is it? Yes, indeed.
Hello, Tim Flannery. How are you?
So this could have been Nouvelle-France?
Possibly, although in fact the English worried too much.
The French had already decided by the time this place was set up
that they were going to concentrate on New Zealand
and New Caledonia, but the British didn't know that. No.
That's the only painting I've seen of aborigines here.
But some of the major ones, Jack White there,
who was still around in the 1880s to greet the buffalo hunters.
So, what's the building back here?
That's the hospital behind you here.
So they were standing right here when they were painted.
Isn't that extraordinary? Look at that.
Well, you know, Alan, I'm really keen
to have a look at this hospital,
because it just to an untrained eye, it looks to me to be rather outsized
for the size of the settlement.
There seems to be a gigantic hospital
on what's rather a trivial-sized settlement, really.
Well, oddly enough, they thought...
For the first four years or so, there was almost no sickness.
They didn't realise, when they started getting supply ships in
from Timor, that they were bringing in malaria with them.
And at one stage, everybody except one man
on the settlement had malaria.
It's difficult to comprehend the conditions
that the settlers endured here.
Dressed in their thick woollen uniforms, in their stone buildings,
on a day that was so hot that you'd be bathed in sweat
just standing still.
And when you add to that the malaria, the other illnesses,
the snakes and a hospital full of colleagues
in various stages of death and dying...
you know, it's a wonder they endured as long as they did.
'You know, almost everyone who arrived here came by sea.
'But there was one man who walked into Port Essington.'
His name was Ludwig Leichhardt
and he was one of Australia's greatest explorers.
It took him 15 months to cover the 4,800km
between South East Queensland and here.
And on the way, he discovered some of the best pastoral
property in the whole of Australia.
One of the things that makes Leichhardt so interesting
is that he wasn't just a geographical explorer,
he was a culinary explorer, as well.
One of the greatest scourges for people travelling through
the country or even at sea was scurvy.
Explorers in Australia came home with their skin so black
their wives didn't recognise them,
with their gums so swollen they couldn't swallow,
all as a result of the disease.
But Leichhardt was the exception.
He never got scurvy, neither did his crew
and part of the reason lies in this humble-looking little bush here,
a thing called a Billy Goat Plum.
Leichhardt tried the fruit as he went along and he discovered
in those small berries up there,
one of the richest sources of vitamin C on Earth
and that's what you need if you want to keep scurvy at bay.
The same couldn't be said for those doomed pioneers of Port Essington,
'who were sick, despondent and isolated.
'And this was the last stop for many of them...
'the cemetery.'
So, Alan, what happened here at the end?
Well, it just outlived its usefulness.
It'd been here for 11 years,
it attracted no settlers, it attracted no traders,
it was too far away to act as a port of refuge for shipwrecked sailors
from the Torres Strait and by now, it was quite apparent the French
had no more interest in Australia, so they simply pulled out.
Well, one day in 1849, the last survivors of the Port Essington
settlement walked down that jetty,
you can see the remains of it behind me,
and bade farewell to this place, presumably without regret.
Their story was really one of heroic endurance, but for me,
it's a deeply disturbing story because they didn't seem to learn
through the experience of living in this land.
They weren't like Leichhardt, they weren't like the aborigines.
And really, you know, at the end of the day,
it was this country that defeated the greatest empire
the world's ever seen, the British Empire.
And to this day, it's as it was,
pristine functioning ecosystems,
tremendous biodiversity that have endured beyond everything
that really the world has been able to throw at it to this point.
But the harsh country wasn't done claiming its pioneering victims.
Just three years later, Leichhardt himself disappeared
while on another continent-crossing journey.
His warmth towards Port Essington
contrasts with another famous visitor's bile.
Biologist Thomas Huxley visited by ship in the settlement's last days,
and recorded his disgust in vivid terms.
"The most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole
"in Her majesty's dominions, fit for neither man nor beast.
"Day and night, there is the same fearful damp
"and depressing heat, producing unconquerable languor...
"Port Essington is worse than a ship.
"It is no small comfort to know this is possible."
A damning description, but perhaps fortunate for the Cobourg Peninsula
and its unspoiled environment,
when European settlement took hold faraway in Port Darwin.
This part of the coastline is spoilt for choice
when it comes to special places.
Many of them are sacred to the traditional owners,
people who've inhabited them sustainably for centuries.
Long before any European ever laid eyes on this part of Australia,
the Aboriginal people living here had a working relationship
with the maritime people of the Macassan kingdom of Gowa,
part of modern day Indonesia.
They were in the habit of coming down here to fish for sea cucumbers
that they then traded with the Chinese.
All of that created an Asian legacy that lasts to this day
and it's why this region is known as a melting pot,
not because of the crushing heat but because of the people.
Contact between Australia's northern indigenous peoples
and the Macassans, who hailed from Sulawesi
and other Spice Islands, dates as far back as the 1600s.
Later, in the 1700s, they exchanged commodities like tobacco, cloth
and rice for the right to harvest the highly prized sea cucumber.
The Macassans lived semi-permanently along this tropical coastline
and mixed in with the locals until trade dwindled out after tax and
licences were imposed by the British towards the end of the 19th century.
Today, 50 different cultures live and work together in Darwin.
Asian, European and Aboriginal cultures,
blended together in this cosmopolitan city.
I've come to secluded Casuarina Beach, just north of the city,
to catch up with Roque Lee, a fisherman and artist
who traces his lineage back through that rich multicultural mix.
We paint what we call X-Ray style of art.. so, it shows internals.
Oh, I see.
If it wasn't for my Aboriginality, I wouldn't be doing this.
How do you see yourself in terms of...Aborigine, Asian...?
I have both different ancestries in me,
um, but the strongest of my feelings is towards my Aboriginal side.
If you lived in Darwin for any period,
you'd soon find that you'll have a cross...
multicultural crosses that you, you know, didn't think were possible.
The history of this coastline is one of challenge.
It thwarted settlement for a further 50 years after the first
fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788.
So, it's not surprising that its recent history is also
marked by adversity,
an attack of such force and ferocity in the opening months of 1942,
that it laid waste to a small frontier town as it was then,
called Darwin.
Among the library of stories about World War II,
there are few to choose from that feature combat on Australian soil.
In fact, Australians fought the enemy elsewhere
with great distinction,
in the fetid jungles of New Guinea
to the burning deserts of North Africa.
But there was one day, 70 years ago, that war's menacing hand
reached across the sea and gripped this country.
I've come here, to Darwin,
to investigate the incredible violence of that day
and an extraordinary story of atonement in its aftermath.
At the height of their expansion into the Pacific,
the Japanese had good tactical reasons for targeting Australia
and they did it with such force in this anchorage in February 1942,
the attack has gone done in history
as Australia's Pearl Harbour.
Darwin had become an important Allied base for the defence
of the Dutch East Indies and so it became a target
for the rapid, all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army.
They rained bombs upon Darwin and the small town of 10,000 residents
simply wasn't prepared for such horror and destruction.
On a warm day in town,
I'm meeting author and military historian Tom Lewis,
who paints a dire picture
of Australia's readiness for war at that time.
The anti-aircraft defences hadn't really been tested in anger before.
The big guns that were based here hadn't been fired.
They weren't allowed to be fired,
because it might upset the townspeople.
The trees here weren't allowed to be cut down
because it might spoil the view.
So there were a lot of bored troops sitting around wondering
whether they were going to be able to defend the place at all.
Some of the ammunition was World War I
and some of it was marked "Not For Use In The Tropics",
and it is pretty hot here. Yeah.
So, they weren't that prepared but there were quite a number of them
and they were ready to fight... DISTANT SIRENS
..and when they did have to fight, they did a good job.
DISTANT EXPLOSIONS
The Japanese were expected,
but we weren't sure on which day they'd arrive.
And we thought they'd arrive from this direction,
when in fact, they arrived from... Which is? That's roughly north.
Right - oh, right.
...they arrived from pretty well that direction,
so, taking the enemy by surprise.
And the initial attack was from high level bombers at about 10,000ft,
followed by the dive bombers after the high level bombers had done
their work and left, and escorted all the time by the fighters.
And 188 aircraft, it was pandemonium.
The raid began on 19th of January, 1942,
just before 10am and lasted till about 10:20...
only 25 minutes to destroy Darwin Harbour and then the town.
36 Zero fighters, 71 dive-bombers and 81 level bombers
comprised the Japanese attack force that assaulted Darwin.
The Post Office was utterly destroyed.
The civilian people were killed inside
and a number of big buildings were struck,
but the main action was in the harbour. So, it was here.
And right throughout this area here were fighting ships
trying to put up a defence against the aircraft.
Within hours, 235 were dead, including civilians.
And 22 ships, 38,000 tonnes worth, were sinking or sunk.
It was a catastrophic event,
it was as bad, really, as it could have been. Oh, yes.
It's the biggest attack on the Australian landmass we've ever had.
What were the Japanese hoping to achieve?
What's their the strategy here?
Two main reasons for attacking Darwin.
The first is that they'd now taken the Southeast Asian Japanese empire
that they'd hoped for,
stretching down as far south as the islands of Indonesia.
They'd overrun Singapore,
they'd swept the Americans out of the Philippines, they'd done a great job.
Now's the time for consolidation - so what you don't want is this large
deepwater harbour, with airfields and oil tanks and everything else,
to be used as a base to attack what you've now got in Southeast Asia.
So that's reason one.
But reason two is they were going to take New Guinea.
Part of the plan was to take New Guinea because if you took
New Guinea, you can control the eastern seaboard to Australia
and you can stop the perfidious Americans arriving
to attack the Japanese.
And this is...?
This is one of the guns from USS Peary, a fighting destroyer
of the United States Navy and she went down on 19th February.
Fought very bravely,
but the end was over for her within 10 minutes, 12 minutes.
Was USS Peary the single biggest loss of life?
The Peary lost 88 people and the gun points to where she went down,
stern down in the water, guns still going, surrounded by smoke...
very sad.
A day of great tragedy and loss,
the scars from which dwelt within the hearts, minds and landscapes
of the besieged for many years.
But Darwin's dark memories defied history and within a few
short years, took a remarkable turn towards reconciliation.
If you'd been here in Darwin's harbour at the end of World War II,
you'd have looked out at a disturbing, extraordinary sight...
the sea in every direction littered with sunken ships.
Seven decades on, Darwin Harbour has a murky
but haunting tale to tell of that day and others that followed.
'With the help of marine archaeologist David Steinberg,
'I'm going to find out what lies beneath.'
Ta. Good to see you, mate. How are you?
David, I have to say on the surface, the water looks like green soup.
What is it like for diving?
Underwater, it looks like green soup, as well.
This is foul ground, a marine term,
a harbour of half submerged, war-torn hulls.
But it wasn't for aesthetic reasons,
or even out of respect for the dead,
that the harbourmaster wanted it cleared.
It was a shipping hazard.
So after the war, what did the people of Darwin
do about their harbour full of wrecks?
Well, they actually turned to the Japanese.
Ironically, there was a Japanese salvage company, privately owned,
that operated in Southeast Asia successfully,
salvaging Japanese wrecks from the war.
It's just about the most controversial move I can think of,
to actually bring in Japanese people
to clear up from the Japanese bombing raid.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
And they certainly appreciated the irony at the time.
How did the locals feel?
I mean, they can't all have been in favour of it,
however practical a step it was...?
I think that's a fair enough statement to say,
that there were people that upset about it,
but the general consensus was it was OK.
These people were coming to do a job, a job that we couldn't do.
And there was a sense, also, by the Japanese company
of how sensitive this was
and they saw this as self-imposed war reparation.
They saw it as their job to clear up the scars of the landscape.
Talk about historical irony...
and grace.
Ryogo Fujita took on the salvage of Darwin Harbour
as a commercial proposition when no suitably qualified
Australian company could be found.
But he endeared himself
when he spoke of building friendship between his country and Australia.
Imagine the courage and moral fibre it would have taken
to be living in the heart of territory
so recently regarded as enemy.
A good guy the locals least expected, in word and in deed.
The abundance of life here is not confined to the coastline.
As we travel along the mangrove fringe of the Northern Territory,
the sea arcs and reaches in to the unique coastal flood plains
of the Adelaide River,
where Miriam Corowa investigates the intriguing history
behind one of the most unusual agricultural endeavours
undertaken in this country.
It was an idea that bizarrely brought Hollywood to Humpty Doo,
about an hour south-east of Darwin
and a million miles from anywhere else.
'Heather Boulden, from the Friends of Fogg Dam,
'explains the vision splendid to me.'
What's the significance of this area?
Well, this place is Fogg Dam,
which was built for the Humpty Doo Rice Project of the 1950s.
After the bombing of Darwin in the Second World War,
the Australia government was keen to develop the north,
increase the population.
One of the federal ministers at the time, Harold Holt,
went to the US and sold the idea of growing rice here,
in the Northern Territory on the Adelaide River flood plains.
The late 1940s and into the '50s was boom-time in America,
but also the advent of the Cold War.
The dream was to grow rice in Humpty Doo to support
a recovering post-war world,
in the fervent belief that hunger bred communism.
The Northern Territory could become the region's food bowl.
New skills, new markets, big money
and big ideas here would feed the starving millions of Asia
and become a bulwark against the spread of communism.
Through Holt's Washington connections,
the idea was taken up by a syndicate of wealthy businessmen,
along with TV personality and philanthropist, Art Linkletter.
They invested heavily and Territory Rice Limited was born in 1955.
RECORDING: Here in northern Australia, Humpty Doo Farm
along the flats of the Adelaide river, 30 miles from the coast,
is producing a robust long grain rice ready for world markets.
The project, though, was absolutely massive, it ended up being a joint
Australian-American project and the agreement was that the business
could have 200,000 hectares of land, which would be from more or less
the Adelaide River to Kakadu, for rice farming,
which is pretty amazing.
And they went into it in a big way with machinery
and very little planning and expected to sort of...
it to work out quickly, too.
As we've already seen and heard, this coastline is not to be
underestimated, especially by men with more money than sense.
For such a grand scheme, at a million dollars,
it was woefully underfunded.
The distance from Darwin, along 70km of rough track,
was a major impediment to its success.
The wet season delivered rain in monsoonal floods,
bogging heavy harvesting machinery for months,
while the rest of the year was bone dry.
The local birdlife was blamed wrongly of eating too much grain.
And if those weren't challenges enough... They were also using
some of the water from the Adelaide River which, being close to the sea,
would sometimes be brackish and they were growing salt-sensitive rice.
So I mean, as I say, so many issues, really.
A champagne business model drowned by a salty Mother Nature.
By 1960, after only five years, the project went down as
one of the biggest agricultural failures in Australian history.
And a final irony -
little did they know that wild rice had been growing in these
coastal plains and harvested by Aborigines, for thousands of years.
Perhaps, someone should have asked them
before embarking on what was a grand folly.
History repeating itself.
Much like the fate of this coast's early settlers,
Australia's unforgiving northern frontier defeated the unprepared.
To survive and prosper here requires tenacity, local knowledge
and a wide variety of skills.
And a particularly fine example of all that
is a legend who's harvested more from these muddy mangroves
than the average man.
All the history books will tell you that Australia was first
sighted by Europeans in the year 1606, but a curious piece of
flotsam has turned up in these parts that could rewrite the history.
I'm told the mysterious artefact was turned up by a local fisherman,
Bill Boustead, who just happens to be a former world champion
in a very niche sport...
How are you doing, Bill?
'World Barefoot Crab Tying, in fact!'
Good to meet you.
And this is Bill's bountiful backyard,
about 30km northeast of Darwin,
mangroves and mudflats that are the perfect habitat
for the highly prized crustacean, Mud Crab.
There's the first spot.
Feels good. You take them, yeah? There's three keepers.
Well, we'll move on, see if there's some more in the next pot.
Some place you've got here, Bill. It is, eh.
But you've seen nothing yet.
Well, here's another pot. We'll try this one.
This one feels kind of light. Oh, look. Oh. Gigantor, look at them!
I win. Oh, look at that. I win! You win. You win.
Look at them monsters! Champion!
Right. We're going to tie them up, yeah?
Oh, look. It's the size of them.
How much damage could the claws do to a person's fingers and toes?
Oh, see those beady eyes? Yeah.
When they grab you, they just give a bit of a squeeze
and they look you fair in the eye and say, "Is that hurting?"
And then they squeeze a bit harder.
And why are you putting your barefoot on it?
That seems like the wrong thing to do.
You need the toe to be able to hold it down, you can't really get
a feel if you've got boots on.
Yeah, it sounds sort of like it's more risky and that, but it's not.
So you go round there like that. Tip him up and over. So neat.
And that makes it that he's safe to handle. You make it look so simple.
Yeah. It is rather simple.
I'll grab another one. Right. Do another one.
So in the competition, what were you required to do?
We stood on a stage and they'd throw three crabs, wild and woolly,
to each contestant and you had to then grab them one at a time,
tie them against the clock and the other contestant.
Yeah. And how fast were you able to tie it?
Well, my record was three crabs in 32 seconds.
What a strange and unexpected skill to have,
barefoot crab tying.
And before you ask, no, I don't want a go.
Now that I've escaped that challenge, Bill is going cook up
some of his morning's catch for me
to try and see what all the fuss is about.
Instant death. Instant death.
Right, Bill, while we wait for those crabs, tell me about this.
Where did this come from?
Well, I was waiting for fishing that particular day
so I had time on my hands.
So I walked through the mangroves along an old, ancient sort of
beach line and this was just exposed at top of the high water mark.
Wow. Have you had experts take a look at it? I have.
I took it to the Wollongong University.
It came back, probable southern European of 500-600 years old.
And by southern European, what countries do you mean?
They thought that it could be Portugal
and that Portugal at that time...
There were suspicions that they'd been in the area here
around those sorts of dates.
So you don't think that this vessel washed ashore
from further north in Asia?
I would like to think that...
that it was thrown off or for whatever reason,
discarded from a Portuguese vessel within close range.
But that's a bit of, you know... that's my dreaming.. I'm with you.
I'm with you. That's a good one. I like that...
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Well, that's what I think, too.
And if history is anything to go by,
Bill's dreaming is not too far-fetched.
After all, the Portuguese,
at the height of their imperial reach in the 1500s,
were a colonial presence in the Spice Islands of south-east Asia.
Time for lunch and my first taste of fresh mud crab.
Is that going to...?
The next best thing is a bit of fresh bread and a real cold beer.
You got that? I have.
Crab is my favourite food in the world and...
..it's quite possible that's the nicest crab I've ever had
anywhere in the world.
Well, it's been a truly memorable experience.
I've been treated to a coastal jewel of the Top End
and I've seen a relic, which, if the experts can agree on its age,
could rewrite the history of European contact with Australia.
Australia's vast remote northern coastline harbours many a surprise.
It's a tropical wonderland, with a huge and exotic marine population.
But there are hidden challenges to this beautiful environment.
As Dr Xanthe Mallett discovers,
one of the more insidious is marine debris,
the lethal flotsam and jetsam of ocean trade.
I have a really rare privilege today to be going out with
the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service
and we're actually on the hunt for a ghost net.
Ghost nets are a major concern here,
a hazard to sea traffic and marine life.
Carried across vast distances by currents and tides,
the nets are roaming and fishing indiscriminately...
a floating wall of death.
Australia shares its northern seas with the expanding
populations of Southeast Asia.
With increasing demand on declining fish stocks,
fishing is getting harder.
So bigger boats are fishing with bigger nets,
which can be lost or discarded,
only to drift the oceans for months or even years,
becoming ghost nets.
Two hours from port, they've spotted a net,
As Northern Territories Fisheries' Simon Xuereb tells me.
The tide's dropped now, it's just poking its head up.
You can see there's not a lot of floats up top
and it is definitely caught on a reef. It looks quite small, though.
Is that one a problem? Something that size?
'Everything is a problem. So, we've seen nets about 40cm by 40cm,
'pieces of net and those things have killed turtles,'
just by himself.
So a panel that's about that big, as big as a rubbish bin lid,
is a potential killer for turtle and wildlife.
This is a Taiwanese net. Taiwanese? Taiwanese.
How do you know? Mainly by the knitting and the mesh.
And as you can see that is just a very efficient thin gauge killer.
So a lot of fish will get caught up in this easily.
Would this have washed in from outside Australian waters?
This has been more travelled than backpackers.
This thing here might have been in the water for,
with the green slime on it, for up to maybe two years or a year, at least.
Oh, really!
The net is caught on a reef 12m down.
Captain Nathan Crofts and Simon will wrap a line around it
to gauge its weight and size.
With the line in place, the boat moves forward...
..and the rope that can carry two-and-a-half tonnes...
snaps!
Well, the big boat just moved 50m and that's moved on a big angle.
That net's massive underneath, so that is the tip of the iceberg.
That thing may even be going five to six,
maybe even ten tonne, who knows?
It's a big net.
Having ascertained the size of the ghost net,
the crew secures it and marks its location.
The net will be retrieved and destroyed by a specialist vessel.
It's been a good day for this multi-agency crew...
another hazard to shipping and marine life successfully eliminated.
The north coast of Australia teems with life, both onshore and off.
But what Mother Nature supplies in abundance, she can also destroy,
with fury and without excuse.
It was Christmas Eve, 1974.
As the good folk of Darwin were rushing to finish the shopping
and wrapping presents for the big day ahead, out in the harbour,
an occasional peril was gathering menace.
A depression in the Arafura Sea was tracking slowly southwest.
But then, after passing close to Bathurst Island,
it turned a sharp left, intensified
and Cyclone Tracy slammed into Darwin at midnight,
recording winds of 217km per hour,
until the wind gauge itself was shattered.
RECORDING: The term Merry Christmas will probably almost be
a dirty term for Darwin people following Cyclone Tracy.
And one of the sad things about it is that
I don't think anyone really took the danger seriously.
Sun down on Christmas Eve, there's a bit more wind, a bit more rain.
But I don't think anyone was going to allow it
to spoil their Christmas.
The cyclone gradually built up to a crescendo,
with ever increasing noise, companied by smashing glass
and, um...tearing roofs.
And then it was quite classical
because in the middle, we had a very brief lull,
rather than a complete calm, a lull.
RECORDING: We even went in and assured the kids
that Santa would be able to brave Cyclone Tracy without any trouble.
Then Tracy really struck.
There had been damage. There had been sheets of iron torn off roofs.
There had been roof joists torn away and these came back at us
from a different angle at possibly twice the speed of the first stage.
In the morning's gloom, the city counted its losses.
49 dead, a further 16 lost at sea.
70% of homes and buildings destroyed...
no-one escaped unscathed.
A flying sheet of iron off the roof next door
flew through the bedroom window.
The next thing I knew I was flying out with the refrigerator
and the kitchen sink and the cupboards.
It's a complete house. Walls...walls and all just disappeared...
leaving us out in the yard.
Just picked us up and threw us.
And what happened to your wife?
My wife was killed.
Flying debris? Debris.
Essential services were severed.
Food and shelter at a premium.
Such was the devastation, an airlift was organised,
the biggest peacetime evacuation ever undertaken in this country.
Many residents drove out.
Within weeks, three-quarters of the population had left.
Those that stayed had to face the massive clean-up task
and begin the rebuilding of a city.
It was a Christmas to forget.
The people who are the Darwinites or the Territorians,
they believe in it,
I believe in it and I believe that Darwin has a great future.
40 years on and Darwin is a boom town of mining and tourism,
a multicultural gateway to Asia...
proof again that these are no ordinary people
that enjoy life along this recalcitrant coastline
Living on this coast also requires a unique antenna for wildlife.
Australia has no shortage of beasties that can bring
a sunny bushwalk or a dip in the sea to a premature end.
Up here is an age-old survivor that rules its domain
both on land and sea.
Marine scientist Dr Emma Johnston delves into the danger zone.
In the Top End of Australia,
headlines like these sell many a newspaper
and fuel our morbid fascination with one of nature's great survivors.
But our relationship may be about to change for the better.
And that's what I'm here to investigate.
In the natural world, when humans run foul of crocodiles,
we usually come off second best.
If the bite and death roll doesn't kill,
then the subsequent infection can be lethal...
..because crocs can carry bacteria and diseases that are foreign
to humans and don't respond to our antibiotics.
But after vicious encounters, wounded crocodiles can live on,
without succumbing to infection, even in filthy waters.
It must be something in the blood...
'and that sparked the interest of Dr Adam Britton,
'a zoologist who's been studying crocodiles for 17 years.'
You see it all the time.
You see a wild crocodile, you pull them out of the river
and they're missing an arm
or they've got this giant gash down their stomach.
You see it in captivity as well.
I mean, there's really horrific injuries.
And a week later, it's completely healed.
So, their immune system's doing something really cool.
And can we test this? Well, we can. Can I see it in action?
We can, actually.
We can do a really, really simple test which hopefully will work.
So what I'm going to need is some crocodile blood
but I'm also going to need some of your blood.
I want to show you just how effective crocodile blood is
against your blood, which is going to be pretty useless in comparison.
It's high tide in Darwin Harbour
and I've got to get some crocodile blood.
I'm joining Northern Territory Parks Rangers
Tom Nichols, Rachel Pearce and Dani Best,
to inspect traps as part of their monitoring of crocodile health
and numbers which have increased significantly
since hunting was banned in 1971.
How many years have you been working here?
I've been working with Parks and Wildlife 33, nearly 34 years.
Things have definitely changed a lot.
When I first started, obviously crocodiles weren't a problem.
They were still on the endangered species list.
Now there are more than 100,000 crocs,
which means the increased likelihood of contact between us and them.
So, has anyone ever been bitten? I've been bitten once, but, yeah.
Wow. When did that happen? Oh, ten years ago now. Right.
'Up here, I guess you'd call that a flesh wound?'
The traps are set using cuts from a wild boar carcass
and are checked three times a week.
Captured crocs are recorded and then given to local farms.
So, what's Rachel doing now?
Rachel's... see the zip tie in her hand?
The snout rope will be going down through the centre of that
and then she will put that behind the rope,
close the jaws and that locks the jaws tight.
OK, open that front gate up.
Whoa.
Wow.
She's covering up those eyes again.
One, two, three.
OK, from here we're just going to take a blood sample.
So we'll see if we can get one.
Sometimes you can't always get it, but we'll see what happens.
'Got the croc blood.
'Now it's my turn.
'In this experiment, Adam is hoping to show that crocodile blood
'kills more bacteria than human blood.'
Well, we're going to take a very small amount of this
and put it onto these agar plates.
Now each one of these has got a colony of bacteria on it,
evenly spread.
We put one drop there on the crocodile side
and then also do the same with the human serum here.
What will happen is,
if there's any anti bacterial properties in the serum,
then it will kill the bacteria adjacent to the spot.
After a night in the incubator,
the bacteria cultures are ready for viewing.
Do you want to have a look down there. Sure. Focus on there.
So on the left we've got the crocodile
and on the right we've got the human.
We can see that the crocodile blood bacteria kill zone
is twice as large as for human blood.
So, what's it actually doing to the bacteria?
Well, we've identified a protein and the way this protein seems to work
is it attaches itself to the bacteria and literally tears open a hole.
So all the bacteria's cell contents leak out and it kills it.
So even against the famous antibiotic resistant bugs
like golden staph?
Or even antibiotic resistant bacteria.
This antibiotic that we've found is effective against it.
That's pretty potent, exciting stuff.
Plenty of potential for human medical applications
but clearly, the research will take time.
So, after a history of mutual antagonism,
crocodiles have secrets that may yet turn
one of nature's most resilient killers,
into one of our greatest saviours.
And wouldn't that make a great headline?
This coast took four attempts to settle.
It's capital was twice laid low
and twice reborn.
These are exceptional people on the frontier of northern Australia.
They are stoic and convinced about a steady life on an intemperate coast.
This has been a fascinating stretch of coastline to visit,
but it's also challenging in so many different ways.
But if you can overcome the challenges,
if they don't break you, then they'll make you stronger
and eventually, they'll win you over completely.
Next time,
Dr Xanthe Mallett investigates a mass murder...
These people were either strangled or stabbed.
It's easy to kill someone without leaving a mark. Yeah, yeah.
..nirvana, at least for Professor Tim Flannery...
These black rocks, they're not just rocks.
They're some of the oldest living things on our planet.
..Dr Emma Johnston, up close with a 60-million-year-old fish...
and I'm tracing the mystery of a lost Australian battle cruiser.
And why does no-one get off of Sydney alive?
Those stories and more from Western Australia's Coral Coast.