Northern Territory, Australia — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Northern Territory known for?

The tropical Top End around Darwin runs on a wet season and a dry one, while the arid Red Centre bakes red around Alice Springs. Uluru rises from the southern desert, the single image most people carry of inland Australia. Kakadu spreads across the Top End floodplains, and the Simpson Desert fills the Territory's south-eastern corner with parallel dunes.

This is the least crowded stretch of the country, most of it flat, hot and empty.

Where is Northern Territory?

The Northern Territory takes up much of the centre and central-north of the Australian mainland, roughly a sixth of the continent. It is huge and mostly empty. Western Australia lies along its western border, Queensland to the east, and South Australia across the whole southern line. To the north the land opens onto the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea, with the Gulf of Carpentaria curling in at the north-eastern corner toward Queensland.

Darwin sits up on that tropical coast, the capital looking out over the Timor Sea. Inland the country dries out and reddens. The MacDonnell Ranges run east and west through the centre near Alice Springs, long parallel ridges of ancient rock.

Further south-west stands Uluru, alone on the desert plain, with the domes of Kata Tjuṯa nearby. The Simpson Desert and its dunes fill the south-eastern corner where the Territory meets both Queensland and South Australia. From the wet northern floodplains down to that dune country is well over a thousand kilometres of changing land, and the drive between them crosses almost the whole width of the continent's interior.

What is Northern Territory like?

Aboriginal culture is not a museum piece in the Territory; it is the living majority in much of the land. More than a hundred Aboriginal languages and dialects are spoken across it, one of the most linguistically dense places on earth. The Larrakia, the saltwater people, hold the Darwin coast.

The Arrernte belong to Mparntwe, the country around Alice Springs in the centre. That span from tropical coast to red desert marks the art as much as the map does. Style shifts with the land.

In the Top End the old rock-art tradition leans figurative, with animals and ancestral figures painted on stone in places like Kakadu. Down in the Red Centre the desert style turns to dot painting, the fine acrylic canvases that carry the country's stories in pattern. Visitors sit with artists at community art centres to hear how a painting maps a stretch of land.

Away from the two towns life is remote and outdoor, tied to the rhythm of wet and dry rather than to any clock, and much of the population is Aboriginal, a share far higher than anywhere else in the country.

What is the history of Northern Territory?

Aboriginal people have lived across this country for tens of thousands of years, long before any border was drawn on a map. South Australia governed the Territory from Adelaide through the nineteenth century and found it too far and too costly to hold. So it let go.

In 1911 the land passed to the new Commonwealth, which ran it from Canberra for decades with no local parliament and no vote of its own. Self-government arrived only in 1978, when the Territory won its own Legislative Assembly and elected leaders. It is still a federal territory, not a full state.

What is the climate of Northern Territory?

Two climates split the Territory top to bottom. Around Darwin, the tropical Top End swings between a hot, humid Wet from about November to April, when monsoon storms flood the country, and a warm, dry season through the rest of the year. Down around Alice Springs the Red Centre is true desert: scorching by day in summer, cold enough to frost the ground on winter nights.

Rain is thunderous in the north and scarce in the south. Travel in the dry.

How do you get to Northern Territory?

Most visitors fly into Darwin, the Top End's airport and the Territory's main gateway from the rest of Australia and from Asia. Alice Springs runs its own airport for the Red Centre. The Ghan comes in overland: a passenger train that crosses the continent from Adelaide up through Alice Springs and Katherine to Darwin, once a week each way.

Drivers take the Stuart Highway, the single sealed road running the full length of the Territory from the southern border to the northern coast. Fuel stops are far apart.