While there was justifiable outcry over the proposal to shut down the national Archives branch in Darwin, the city repeatedly shows it has forgotten its past or could not care less. Some time ago, a longtime Darwin resident highlighted the issue when he said he heard an ABC presenter ask a colleague who was Dick Ward , the person after whom Dick Ward Drive is named.
Now , for the second time, a large display advertisement appeared in the NT News of March 5, 2010 , accompanied by a blurred map with a proposal to change the zoning of conservation land to light industrial near the Totem Road intersection, twice spelling Dickward(sic) Drive .
A crusading lawyer who became a judge, Ward , an eloquent speaker, first married the court official with whom he dived into a ditch the day Darwin was bombed. He played a major part in the political,social and sporting life of Alice Springs and Darwin and was deeply involved in setting up the NT Housing Commission. With Jim Bowditch , editor of the NT News, he fought many crusades, often pro bono . A key figure in the history of the NT ALP, he has been reduced to DICKWARD on a buckled road sign pointing in the wrong direction and now, in a newspaper advert is Dickward, seemingly without a whimper from party heads. When first constructed, there were ongoing problems with the surface of Dick Ward Drive and the ALP urged the government to quickly remedy the situation so that a highly regarded ALP warrior 's name was not besmirched.
Little Darwin recently drew attention to the fact that further down Dick Ward Drive the road sign for Fitzer Drive had been tampered with so that it reads FITZ DR and had been in this state for a long time without anyone apparently noticing or caring . Policeman Tas Fitzer and his wife, a nurse, were great Territorians .
Out in the Litchfield Shire , another outstanding police officer, Superintendent Wilson Coleridge Littlejohn , his surname, in telephone street directory maps and a street sign , was presented as two words- Little John, a la Sherwood Forest . Littlejohn , an RAF pilot in WW1 , was in charge of the police who rescued Mrs Petrov from her Russian guards at Darwin Airport. The Retired Police Association of the NT, part of the thinning ranks of the limping but alert old guard , sprang into action to rectify the Littlejohn snafu. Modern Darwin, seemingly increasingly oblivious of its past , was unaware of this and other errors .
When these above mistakes are added to the gross spelling errors in Darwin’s war memorial and clangers in the text of various websites relating to war sites, allowed to continue for years , it projects an image of a place which has forgotten its past and certainly does not protect visible signs of great people and major events.
