Northern Region
Change and development
Within the general picture of the Territory’s social development, there are a number of projects which stand out . These include:
• The Wadeye community, in the far west of the region, was the site of a Council of Australian Governments' (COAG) trial to improve the co-ordination of service delivery to Indigenous communities. Through this process there have been important developments in the community’s governance, education (school attendance is slowly improving), the development of local enterprises and a number of other areas. The Wadeye COAG trial, however, was generally considered a failure and not an appropriate model for the future of other communities. The federal Intervention program is having its own effect on development in Wadeye, and improvements are being made.
• The town of Jabiru is the centre of uranium mining in the Territory. The Ranger mine some 20km from the town has always been controversial, not surprising given the worldwide protests against uranium mining. However, the Ranger mine is a profitable mining venture, and its owner Energy Resources Australia, has already moved to expand its operations on the site. It also holds the nearby Jabiluka site as a long-term asset, but has pledged it will not develop any new mine without the consent of Traditional Owners.
• One billion dollars is being injected into the Darwin Waterfront plan, which will transform the reclaimed land in front of the Stokes Wharf into a major business, tourism and recreation hub. At the centre of the project is the $115 million Darwin Convention Centre, which will be surrounded by offices, a wave pool, two hotels and more than 1000 apartments when the plan is finally completed about 2010. The project has already transformed the 25-hectare former industrial site into a vibrant commercial and tourism centre since the opening of the Convention Centre in June, 2008. More than 86 per cent of the waterfront development is coming from private sector developers. A statutory authority, the Darwin Waterfront Corporation, has been established to develop, manage and service the precinct.
• Darwin is fast becoming one of the country’s most important hubs for the oil, gas and mining industries. Its East Arm Port already contains gas refining facilities and the shipping of gas to major energy importing countries. ConocoPhillips exports the gas from its Timor fields through Darwin, piping the gas some 500 km to the port. The NT Government is also bidding to supply gas to Japan through its port facilities from new gas fields off the North-West coast of Western Australia.
• The defence industry is now a major contributor to the Territory’s economy. The combined forces of the army, air force and navy now rotate through Darwin and the air base at Tindal, with defence families having a big impact on the real estate scene in Darwin and Palmerston.
Issues and lessons
Issues such as community development processes in Wadeye, the future of oil, gas and mineral resources and big financial commitments to infrastructure typify the issues requiring resolution in the Northern Territory towards the end of the first decade of the new century.
Many Indigenous communities are in a similar situation to Wadeye, and the lessons from the failed Wadeye COAG trial are now being absorbed as new strategies of service delivery are attempted. Jabiru’s future looks even more promising now that it is part of the new West Arnhem Shire, which has set up headquarters in the town.
History of the Northern Region - A difficult start
The northern coastline of the NT was not an easy place to start a colonial settlement. The first group of British soldiers to try landed on Melville Island in 1824 and gave up in 1829, commenting on the warrior skills of the Tiwi people. On the mainland, various attempts were abandoned until Surveyor-General Goyder drew up a plan for the settlement to be called Palmerston in 1869.
The plan did not consider the estimated 500 Aboriginal people – called Larrakia – already occupying that country, but this did not threaten the town’s existence at the time. A greater threat was the simple irrelevance of the far north to those in the southern cities.
Overland Telegraph Line
This was resolved with the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line. When the first pole was inserted in the ground at the route’s northern end in 1870, Darwin was given a role in communications and so the new town’s future became certain. Construction of the overland Telegraph Line unearthed gold, and shortly afterward prospectors arrived in Darwin, on their way to the goldfields of Pine Creek. The NT’s first train line, from Darwin to Pine Creek, opened in 1889.
Chinese settlers
In those years, there were many more settlers of Chinese ancestry than Europeans. With the winding down of the gold boom and completion of the railway, they soon established a small Chinatown in Darwin’s centre, adding to the town’s multicultural mix.
Larrakia people
In Darwin, many Larrakia people were employed as domestic helpers, gardeners and as crew for pearling luggers, while others lived increasingly uncertain lives on the little land they had not been forced from. On the edges of the new town - at such places as Mindil Beach and Lameroo Beach - camps of the Larrakia persisted, increasingly destitute as their hunting grounds diminished in size and productivity.
Lives Controlled
Under 1910 legislation, a Chief Protector was appointed “the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and half-caste child up to the age of 18 years”. So began the many years of governments controlling the lives of Aboriginal people in the NT. In subsequent years, camps for Aboriginal people were set up at Myilly Point (later moved to Bagot Reserve) and Kahlin Compound (for children of mixed race). By law, Aboriginal people had to stay in the camps unless in employment, and marriage became subject to official approval.
Missionaries
Meanwhile, other parts of the region were being penetrated by a different sort of outsider: the missionary priest. Following a massacre in 1885 land had been made available for a mission at Daly River. Jesuits made several attempts, at various sites, to set up a mission there.
To the north, Father Gsell’s boat anchored off Bathurst Island in 1911, and he eventually moved ashore to start a Catholic mission at Nguiu.
In 1925 the Church of England Missionary Society took up an offer from the NT Administration to set up a mission east of the Alligator River (land previously part of Paddy Cahill’s dairy farm). And later, further to the west at a place called Port Keats, the Reverend Father Docherty strode ashore in 1934 to bring the cross and rosary to another group of non-believers.
These missionaries did what all missionaries in the NT did: they cleared land, built houses, established vegetable gardens, translated the Bible, started a school and provided clothing and rudimentary medical care.
At one point, missions took on the role of looking after mixed race children taken from their parents. In 1941 the Croker Island mission, to Darwin’s north, opened a home for children formerly in the Kahlin Compound.
World War Two
On 19 February, 1942 enemy planes were seen over Darwin, bombs hit, and the reality of war came home. This transformed the region, as most of Darwin was evacuated south, while Army camps and airstrips were set up just outside the city. Camps of Aboriginal people sprang up nearby, providing labourers, orderlies and cleaners.
Many of those Aboriginal camps persisted long after the War, and in subsequent decades they became a staging point for people moving from cattle stations or the bush to the cities, and vice versa. Some are still there today, as established communities.
Batchelor
A little further south, the sleepy town of Batchelor awoke during the later years of the War to find itself a large Allied air force base - the first of several changes of identity for the town. At nearby Rum Jungle, Australia’s first commercial deposit of uranium was found in 1949, and so Batchelor became a mining town for some 15 years.
In later decades it was to become the site of a newly-created Batchelor College (now the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education), a unique organisation delivering tertiary education to Aboriginal people in even the most remote NT communities. The town is at the entrance to the spectacular Litchfield Park, and so is adding tourism and park administration to its attributes.
To the southwest
Before and immediately after the War, the region to the west and southwest of Darwin had been pretty much left alone by governments. Here, the Aboriginal population was in trouble from disease and the uncontrolled intrusions of non-Aboriginal adventurers.
Outside Darwin there was little control of the activities of everyone from buffalo hunters to scientists, crocodile skin traders to would-be miners, and few rights for Aboriginals. Their migration into Darwin quickened in the post-War years as it became more difficult to live off the land.
Maningrida
The movement of Aboriginal people to Darwin from the western edges of the Arnhem Land Reserve, and from what is now the Kakadu region, prompted the Government to establish a coastal settlement in West Arnhem Land. In 1957 the former trading post of Maningrida, at the mouth of the Liverpool River, was set up as a major community - the first settlement in Arnhem Land not established as a mission. This encouraged the centralisation of a number of Aboriginal groups from the surrounding area, and the community grew rapidly.
In the 1970s a strong homelands movement developed in the region, acting to decentralise the population somewhat.
Cyclone Tracy
On Christmas Eve 1974, Cyclone Tracy barrelled down from the northeast, made a sharp turn when it got past the Tiwi Islands and scored a direct hit on Darwin. The place was never the same again.
In many ways, Tracy marked a transition point from the ‘old Darwin’, the big country town of misfits, eccentrics, rough trade and frontier mentality, to the new, more sophisticated Darwin. In the rebuilding which followed Tracy, ‘standards’ came to apply - in more ways than one.
Aboriginal discontent
Outside Darwin, there were also murmurings of change. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Aboriginal rights to land were surfacing in public policy debate. The walk-off from Wave Hill Station by the Gurindji people, and the Bark Petition from Yolngu at Yirrkala, were part of a wave of dissatisfaction across the Territory. In Darwin city, Larrakia people started a campaign of civil disobedience in support of their land rights. Street marches, sit-downs and political agitation went on throughout 1971 and 1972, aimed at securing title to land called Kulaluk in central Darwin.
This eventually bore fruit as the Commonwealth Government set up the process to develop a system in the NT which would give some justice to the country’s original inhabitants: Justice Woodward was appointed head of a Commission of Inquiry into appropriate ways to recognise Aboriginal people’s interests in land.
Land rights
The eventual declaration by the Commonwealth Government of the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 had a big impact on the Darwin Region. On the western side, Aboriginal people in Port Keats and nearby communities, and on the eastern side in Oenpelli, Maningrida and nearby communities, suddenly had legally-enforceable rights to own their land and control of what happened on it. And outside these areas, it was now possible to lodge claims to land ownership based on Aboriginal tradition.
Almost immediately the new land rights regime was tested through the proposal to mine uranium at the Narbalek and Ranger mines, and the lodging of a land claim covering the Cox Peninsula (near Darwin) by Larrakia people.
Kakadu
Despite strong opposition to the Land Rights Act from the NT Government of the time, other developments in the Darwin Region demonstrated that land rights can benefit both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
In particular, a decision by Traditional Owners of the Kakadu region in 1978 to lease the land back to the Commonwealth for use as a national park has facilitated a major tourist industry while improving the incomes and knowledge of people of both cultures. Under this agreement, Aboriginal people retain their management rights through seats on the Kakadu Board.
Self-government and local government
In 1978 the Commonwealth enacted the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978, giving many of the powers normally exercised by State Governments to the NT’s recently-created Legislative Assembly. One category of powers the Commonwealth specifically retained for itself was Aboriginal affairs.
With the passage in 1978 of the Local Government Act (NT), local government was extended beyond the main cities. However, local government services became a patchwork of community-run councils, many of which failed to deliver. Thirty years later the NT Government decided to rewrite the Act, and reform the system, creating eight new Shires that would take over service delivery and improve its efficiency.