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suited to the narrow peninsula on which the town was placed. However, he was far from pleased with the sanitation
and drainage system in the town. That Darwin in 1940 still relied on the night cart system, with sewerage being
emptied into the sanitary reserve at the base of the cliffs between the Botanic Gardens and residential areas was, in
McInnis’s opinion, totally unacceptable in a tropical town. He was equally scathing about the hygienic conditions
in the ‘bag hut’ town camps, which had developed due to the lack of proper housing in Darwin, and about the total
lack of zoning, the overcrowding and the sanitary situation in Darwin’s China Town.
The 1940 Darwin Town Plan, which McInnis produced, was sweeping in its depth and attention to detail.
The plan went beyond the physical building of a town on a particular site and the supply of the essential requirements
of sanitation, sub divisions, road works and zoning. It took into consideration aspects such as the climate of
Darwin, its surrounds, the creation of a town management board, the allocation of spaces for present and future
public access to recreation areas, the creation of a civic centre and a sweeping water front drive, and the necessity
of a sealed highway to connect Darwin with southern centres in order to promote future development and tourism.
McInnis addressed details such as housing, recommending that the elevated houses designed by B C G Burnett
were more suitable and less space consuming than older style houses with large verandahs. He also provided a
listing, which he had compiled with the assistance of local botanist Florenz Bleeser of trees and plants best suited
to the implementation of a greening program for the town.
Abbott was delighted with the McInnis plan. It did not, however, please any of the armed forces chiefs.
McInnis in his report was blunt in his condemnation of any long-term occupancy by the armed forces of prime
residential and recreational areas such as the Esplanade, Larrakeyah and East Point. He particularly upset the Navy
with his proposed civic centre being located in the Bennett Street area that that service claimed.
A start was made to implement McInnis’s plan. A sewerage incinerator was constructed and kerbing and guttering
commenced in the town centre. However, the escalation of the Second World War, the evacuation of civilians
and the bombing of Darwin in February 1942, brought such work to a halt. The military, given breathing space,
prepared its own Darwin town plan. The military plan, prepared by three serving Army officers, was submitted
to the federal government in 1943. Included in the plan was the proposal that all privately owned properties in
Darwin should be purchased by the government and diagrams which designated all the prime sites in Darwin to
the armed forces. In response to the military town plan, Abbott again asked that McInnis be appointed to submit a
further plan for the town.
Changes to the town brought about by the war years provided, in McInnis’s view, ‘A unique opportunity to
rebuild Darwin in such a way that it would reflect Australia’s faith in the future.’ While most of the recommendations
of the 1940 town plan remained unchanged, the bombing of the Post Office and the removal of China Town by
the military allowed for the creation of a civic square on a large scale, including a memorial beacon in memory of
those killed during wartime hostilities. Abbott took the 1944 McInnis town plan to the Prime Minister, John Curtin,
and was promised that the sum of 2 000 000 Pounds would be allocated for post war reconstruction in Darwin.
Unfortunately, Curtin died before official approval was given to the McInnis town plan.
In 1945, Abbott wrote despairingly that ‘over all the householders of the Darwin area lies a kind of monstrous
shadow known as the Darwin Town Plan’. Now called THE PLAN, it gained the doubtful dignity of capital letters
due to the heated criticism to which it was subjected. It was no longer the McInnis plan but a new plan developed
by an inter departmental committee. Launched officially amidst much fanfare in early 1947, the new plan made
no acknowledgement of McInnis’s work, the military plan of 1943 being stated as marking the beginning of the
development of a Darwin Town Plan. In the inter departmental plan, private property having been subject to
compulsory government acquisition in 1945, planning was approached as though Darwin ‘was a paddock and not a
town already in existence’. All buildings, apart from the Hotel Darwin, were to be flattened, the civic centre would
be on the Esplanade and the original Goyder lay out of streets would be replaced by a series of cul de sacs and
residential allotments. Despite the expenditure of millions of Pounds on the inter departmental vision of Darwin
as a ‘Canberra in the tropics’, a complete town plan and report was never finalised. In 1950, with only 38 houses
being completed since the war and planning in chaos, the Administrator, A R Driver, wrote to the Minister for the
Interior informing him that he had formed a committee with a view to ‘curtailing that plan and endeavouring to cut
out commitment sufficiently in order that a Plan may be evolved something on the lines of the McInnis plan.’
But time had run out for Darwin. The opportunity to build a modern tropical town had been lost. The Menzies
government elected to power in 1949 showed little interest in the replanning of Darwin. The ‘colossal bureaucratic
experiment in town planning’, the Darwin Town Plan, was scrapped and there were no funds available to implement
a plan along the lines that McInnis had put forward.
In 1945, McInnis was appointed as Tasmania’s first Town and Planning Commissioner, a post he held until his
retirement in 1950. Interviewed in 1980, McInnis said that he would ‘have liked to live in Darwin’. But he never
returned to the north and spent the rest of his life in Tasmania. In his retirement, he spent much of his time in his
garden overlooking the Derwent River in Hobart, where he recorded the melodies of many of the birds, which
found sanctuary in the trees he preserved and planted. He was a member of the Board of National Fitness and was
involved with the administration of Saint Aidan’s Anglican Church.
McInnis passed away at the Repatriation Hospital in Hobart on 8 May 1982, aged 91 years. His wife, who died
in 1977, and his daughter predeceased him.
E Gibson, ‘Bag-Huts, Bombs and Bureaucrats’, BA (Hons) Thesis, University of Queensland, 1989.
EVE GIBSON, Vol 2.McKAY, MARGARET HEATHER BELL: see DODD, MARGARET HEATHER BELL