DARWIN "DOCTOR "WAS ACTUALLY BARON

During his fabulous life , diver Carl Atkinson doctored many things , but he was never a medico.The ABC breakfast show wrongly called him Dr Atkinson of Doctor's Gully, implying he had uttered the Hippocratic Oath and that Darwin's fish feeding tourist attraction spot is therefore named after him. Carl , however, ran the only recompression chamber in the north at Doctor's Gully and saved the lives of many pearl divers afflicted by the bends. Reputed to have mixed it with Errol Flynn in New Guinea , he also bought the wartime wrecks in the harbour, beat up at gunpoint southern thugs who tried to take them from him , had a tree which grew through the roof of his bedroom in his shack, from which it was said he , like Tarzan ,would swing and beat his chest after a conquest. A close friend of NT News editor , Jim Bowditch, Carl's engineering and mechanical skills kept the clapped out press at the newspaper running when it was in the old Tin Bank, Smith Street. Journalist /author Keith Willey wrote about Atkinson in Eaters of the Lotus , Jacaranda Press, 1964, dubbing him the Baron of Doctor's Gully . Doctor's Gully derives its name from the early days of settlement . Carl suffered a stroke and Bowditch later caught up with him in Queensland. Both outstanding men will be the subject of a special feature soon to be posted in Little Darwin ... By Peter Simon