Darwin, Northern Territory

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Darwin sits at the very top of Australia, closer to Singapore than to Sydney, a city that has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times it has almost become part of its identity. Named in 1839 for a young naturalist who never set foot there, it has since survived two cyclones that levelled entire neighbourhoods, Japanese air raids that made it the most heavily bombed place on Australian soil in wartime, and a Christmas Day catastrophe in 1974 that sent thirty thousand people fleeing the ruins. Yet Darwin keeps coming back. Today it is home to nearly 140,000 people, holds a military partnership with the United States, and quietly anchors a $700 million undersea cable linking Australia to the rest of the world. How did a remote colonial outpost on a tropical harbour become a city that keeps refusing to disappear? And what do the Larrakia people, who called it Garramilla long before any European cartographer arrived, make of the place it has become?

• 2. Garramilla

  ›

  Garramilla, the Larrakia word for the Darwin area, translates as "white stone", a reference to the pale rock and sea cliffs that define the harbour's edge. The Larrakia people were not isolated; they maintained trading routes reaching into Southeast Asia and imported goods from as far away as South and Western Australia. Songlines ran throughout the country, carrying stories and histories along well-worn paths. When the Dutch arrived on Australia's northern coastline in the 1600s, they landed on the Tiwi Islands and were met with armed resistance from the Tiwi peoples. Those early European visitors left behind their cartographic fingerprints: the region's Dutch names, Arnhem Land and Groote Eylandt, survive on maps to this day. Dutch explorers also applied the name Van Diemen's Land to the Darwin region during this period, a name that would later attach more permanently to Tasmania, creating a lasting confusion. The Larrakia remain the traditional custodians of the area, and as of the 2016 census, Indigenous Australians made up 10.4 percent of Darwin's population, the largest proportion of any Australian capital city.

• 3. The Naming of Port Darwin

  ›

  On the 9th of September 1839, Lieutenant John Lort Stokes, first officer aboard the survey ship HMS Beagle, sailed into the harbour that would bear another man's name. The captain, Commander John Clements Wickham, chose to honour Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who had sailed with him as a civilian passenger on an earlier Beagle expedition. Darwin himself never visited the harbour named for him. The settlement that grew there took the name Palmerston in 1869, after British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, when Surveyor-General George Goyder of South Australia founded a small community of 135 people between Fort Hill and the escarpment. It was only in 1911, when the Northern Territory passed from South Australian to Commonwealth administration, that the city officially became Darwin. That same year, the Overland Telegraph, whose poles had first been erected in Darwin in 1870, had already been connecting Australia to the rest of the world for four decades. The discovery of gold by telegraph workers digging holes at Pine Creek in the 1880s had given the fledgling colony an unexpected economic jolt and brought thousands of new arrivals north.

• 4. Destruction and Reconstruction

  ›

  A cyclone tore through Darwin in 1897, and another followed in 1937. Then, on the 19th of February 1942, at 9:57 in the morning, 188 Japanese warplanes arrived in two waves over the city. The same fleet had bombed Pearl Harbor, but the assault on Darwin involved considerably more bombs. At least 243 people were killed, along with immense damage to the town, airfields, and aircraft. Darwin Chinatown, which had stood at the heart of the city since the 1880s, was razed to the ground and never rebuilt. Northern Territory administrator Aubrey Abbott subsequently seized the land from its Chinese owners, whom he wished to remove from the area. The raids were only the first of many. Darwin was rebuilt and developed after the war, gaining city status on Australia Day, the 26th of January 1959. Then on the 25th of December 1974, Cyclone Tracy struck. It killed 71 people and destroyed more than 70 percent of the city's buildings, including many old stone structures such as the Palmerston Town Hall. Thirty thousand of the city's 46,000 residents were evacuated in what was described as the biggest airlift in Australia's history. The Darwin Reconstruction Commission, led by former Brisbane lord mayor Clem Jones, oversaw the rebuilding of the city during the late 1970s using newer materials and construction techniques. The Chinese Temple, first founded in 1887 and damaged by the 1897 and 1937 cyclones, bombed in 1942, and completely destroyed by Tracy on the 24th of December 1974, was rebuilt and the reconstruction completed in 1978.

• 5. The Sky Over Darwin

  ›

  On the 10th of December 1919, Captain Ross Smith and his crew touched down in Darwin and collected a ten-thousand-pound prize from the Australian government for completing the first flight from London to Australia in under thirty days. Their aircraft was a Vickers Vimy, registration G-EAOU, and the strip where they landed is today known as Ross Smith Avenue. The MacRobertson Air Race of 1934, officially a London-to-Melbourne centenary race, required a compulsory stop at Darwin. A Time magazine account from the 29th of October 1934 captured the moment when Tom Campbell Black and C. W. A. Scott flew their scarlet Comet into Darwin having covered the last leg on a single engine, landing on a field made soggy by the first rain in seven months. They broke the England-to-Australia record, completing the journey in 52 hours and 33 minutes. Other pioneering aviators who passed through Darwin included Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, and Bert Hinkler. The original QANTAS Empire Airways hangar, a registered heritage site, still bears scars from the 1942 bombing raids and operates today as a museum. The Darwin Aviation Museum, about 8 km from the city centre on the Stuart Highway, houses one of only three B-52 bombers on public display outside the United States.

• 6. A City of Many Languages

  ›

  Darwin's population at the 2021 census stood at 139,902, nearly 53 percent of the entire Northern Territory. The city's demographic character reflects its geography and its history. At the 2016 census, 38.3 percent of residents were born overseas. The five largest groups of overseas-born residents came from the Philippines, England, New Zealand, India, and Greece. Only 58 percent of the population spoke English exclusively at home. Tagalog was spoken by 3.7 percent, Greek by 3.5 percent, and Mandarin by 2 percent. Portuguese, spoken largely by the Timorese community, accounted for 0.5 percent. The city averaged 33 years old in 2011, considerably younger than the national average of around 37, in part because of the military presence and because many residents choose to retire elsewhere. The largest religious category as of the 2021 census was no religion at all, claimed by 41.7 percent of Darwin residents. Darwin's multiculturalism has shaped even its food culture: Southeast Asian noodle broth laksa is widely described as the city's favourite meal.

• 7. The Tropical Year

  ›

  Darwin's climate operates on a rhythm unlike any other Australian capital. The dry season runs from roughly May to September, during which afternoon relative humidity averages around 30 percent and nearly every day brings clear skies. Darwin records an average of 8.4 daily hours of sunshine, the second-highest of any Australian capital city; only Perth, at 8.8, exceeds it. Then the build-up begins: temperature and humidity climb together through October and November before the wet season arrives in late November or early December. In the wettest months, afternoon relative humidity exceeds 70 percent. On the 16th of February 2011, Cyclone Carlos brought 367.6 mm of rain in a single day, a Bureau of Meteorology record. That same February ended as Darwin's wettest month ever recorded, with 1,110.2 mm falling at the airport. Lightning is a near-constant feature of the wet season. On the 31st of January 2002, an early-morning squall line produced over 5,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes within a 60 km radius of Darwin, roughly three times the annual lightning total for Perth. The sea temperature ranges from 25.8 degrees Celsius in July to 31.5 degrees in December, meaning the ocean offers little relief from the heat. From October to May, deadly box jellyfish patrol the coastal waters, and saltwater crocodiles are common in every surrounding waterway.

• 8. Strategic Crossroads

  ›

  On the 16th of November 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and President Barack Obama announced that the United States would station troops in Australia for the first time since World War II. The agreement placed Darwin at the centre of a new Pacific security arrangement: 250 Marines arrived in 2012, with numbers rising to more than 1,150 by 2014 and a planned ceiling of 2,500 on six-month rotations. The package included F-22 Raptors, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, and KC-135 refuellers. A 2019 telephone survey found 51 percent of Darwin residents held positive feelings about the U.S. troop presence, with only 6 percent responding negatively. In 2022, the Northern Territory Government announced a $700 million international undersea cable system landing at Darwin, linking it directly to Indonesia, Singapore, the United States, and Timor-Leste. The Adelaide-Darwin railway, completed on the 17th of September 2003 and carrying its first passenger service in 2004, gave the city its first land connection to southern Australia by rail. The deep-water East Arm Wharf, opened in 2000, has 754 metres of wharf line and can handle Panamax-sized ships up to 274 metres long. Mining and energy production from the region exceeds $2.5 billion per year, with gold, zinc, bauxite, and offshore oil and gas from the Timor Sea forming the core of that output.