Short answers, pulled from the story.
Darwin was named in 1839 by Commander John Clements Wickham of HMS Beagle in honour of Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who had sailed with Wickham on an earlier Beagle expedition. The harbour was first called Port Darwin, and the settlement there was initially named Palmerston in 1869 before officially becoming Darwin in 1911.
The Larrakia people, the traditional custodians of the Darwin area, called it Garramilla, meaning "white stone", a reference to the colour of the rock and sea cliffs in the area. The Larrakia maintained trading routes with Southeast Asia and established songlines throughout the country long before European contact.
Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin on the 25th of December 1974, killing 71 people and destroying more than 70 percent of the city's buildings. Thirty thousand of the city's 46,000 residents were evacuated in what was described as the biggest airlift in Australia's history. The city was rebuilt during the late 1970s by the Darwin Reconstruction Commission under former Brisbane lord mayor Clem Jones.
More bombs were dropped on Darwin than on Pearl Harbor. On the 19th of February 1942, the same Japanese fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor sent 188 warplanes in two waves over Darwin, killing at least 243 people and causing immense damage. These raids were described as the most serious attacks on Australia in time of war.
Darwin had a population of 139,902 at the 2021 census, which represents nearly 53 percent of the entire Northern Territory's population. The city's average age in 2011 was 33 years, younger than the national average of around 37, partly due to the military presence and the tendency of older residents to retire elsewhere.
Captain Ross Smith and his crew landed in Darwin on the 10th of December 1919, completing the first flight from London to Australia in under thirty days and winning a ten-thousand-pound prize from the Australian government. They flew a Vickers Vimy, registration G-EAOU, and the airstrip where they landed is today known as Ross Smith Avenue.