Darwin – WWII Oil Storage Tunnels and some historic buildings (Day 3 – 19th August 2011)

Another lovely sunny day so a tour of the oil storage tunnels would be a good chance to get out of the heat for awhile. Sounds strange but these tunnels were incredible. Darwin was devastated by bombing by the Japanese during WWII, in fact on 19th February 1942 115 tonnes of bombs were dropped more than Pearl Harbour by the same Japanese planes 10 weeks before! Evidence of the WWII airfields and historic aerodromes can be seen as you drove into Darwin from the south, and some of the old B52 bombers are still preserved here.
The tunnels were excavated out of the hillside below Darwin city to store the fuel for the Australian aircraft. Six tunnels approximately 170 metres in length were built but fuel was never stored after all that! We were able to go into two of the tunnels which were open to the public. Lots of amazing old photographs hang on the walls illustrating just how hard it must have been to defend Australia from this northern outpost and how badly hit Darwin was.