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Northern Territory: The Indigenous Heart of Australia

The Northern Territory will enhance your Australian experience with its magical mix of ancient Indigenous culture, unforgettable wildlife encounters, untamed rivers, laidback towns and awe-inspiring scenery.

Big, vast, expansive, huge – whichever way you cut it, the Northern Territory is daunting. This, in many respects, is the “real Australia” as you imagine it – remote, mostly uninhabited, the landscape ground down over millennia. Few visitors who explore Australia’s remote Red Centre and wild Top End are left unmoved by the stark, expansive beauty of the landscape. The Outback’s amazing World Heritage national parks, many on the ancestral homelands of the traditional indigenous owners, are home to some of Australia’s most fascinating and iconic natural attractions, such as Uluru (Ayers Rock) and the vast bird-filled wetlands and raging waterfalls of Kakadu. The Outback contains deeply carved rock canyons, deserts with unending horizons, and prolific wildlife. It is Australia at its wildest, rawest, and most sublime, and it’s a landscape that will sear itself onto your memory forever.

The Northern Territory’s top and bottom halves are distinctly different; one steamy and green, the other dry, sandy and ochre stained. The Top End rallies in the Wet, with its gushing waterfalls, soaked wetlands and spectacular electric skies. Further south, the Red Centre responds to rare rains with carpets of colour, its desert grasses and wildflowers relishing the opportunity to shine. Both regions harbour World Heritage-listed wonders – think Kakadu and Uluru – and between them, tens of thousands of square kilometres have been protected, ensuring that nature roams free and ancient Aboriginal traditions can be maintained in the places they originated. Accessible, authentic and awe inspiring, the Northern Territory is a region of extremes with a vibe like no other.

Top Reasons to Visit Northern Territory

With spectacular terrain, one-of-a-kind plant and animal species and rugged national parks, the Northern Territory is a place of wild, rugged beauty. The tropical Top End is bursting with birdlife, wild rivers and untamed wilderness, while the Red Centre is the landscape most closely associated with Australia’s Outback – endless horizons, vast deserts of red sand, mysterious monoliths, and cloudless blue skies.

The most famous of Australian icons is the red monolith of Uluru (Ayers Rock), but it is just one of the area’s stunning natural features. Kakadu National Park is home to wetlands teeming with crocodiles and birds; Arnhemland is a stretch of rocky escarpments and rivers owned by Aborigines and seen by few others, while the town of Katherine is famous for its river gorge.

Not-to-be-missed natural attractions:

For thousands of years the area of northern and central Australia has been home to Aboriginal communities that have undiminished ties to the land. Today, much of Australia’s Outback land is still Aboriginal-owned, enabling their ancient culture to flourish. Stunning examples of ancient Aboriginal rock art remain – on cliffs, in hidden valleys, and in city art galleries and cooperative art centres in remote communities. Kakadu National Park is one of these places where a trail of ancient rock paintings can be traced across the land.

But there is more to Aboriginal culture than art, and there is no better place to try and understand it than in the Northern Territory, on a guided tour of some of the country’s most spiritually significant Aboriginal sites.

Best places to experience Aboriginal culture:

The Northern Territory’s capital, Darwin, is a small city but it’s modern, wealthy, tropical, and rapidly growing. It may be Australia’s smallest capital city, but everything about tropical Darwin is larger than life. It’s fun-loving, multicultural and buzzes with upbeat energy – evident in its vibrant markets, bar-lined streets and on its harbour sunset-cruises.

Alice Springs gives you a better flavour for the Outback than Uluru. A frontier town quite literally in the middle of Australia, Alice Springs, or simply ‘Alice’ to the locals, contrasts its dusty streets with the richness of its Aboriginal art galleries, the beauty of its surrounding ranges, the depth of its rural history and the diversity of its never-ending desert landscape.

Top city experiences:

Northern Territory History

Australian Aborigines have occupied parts of the Northern Territory for around 60,000 years, although the central regions were not inhabited until about 24,000 years ago. The first significant contact with outsiders occurred in the 17^th century when Macassan traders from early-day Sulawesi in Indonesia came to the Top End to collect trepang (sea cucumber).

While the process of white settlement in the Northern Territory was slower than elsewhere in Australia, it had an equally troubled and violent effect. By the early 20^th century, most Aboriginal people were confined to government reserves or Christian missions.

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In the early 1870s, during digging to establish the Overland Telegraph (from Adelaide to Darwin), gold was discovered. Though the gold finds were relatively insignificant, the searches for it unearthed a wealth of natural resources that would lead to mining becoming a major economic presence in the Northern Territory.

Today, Aboriginal people own about half of the land in the Northern Territory, including Kakadu and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Parks, which are leased back to the federal government for exploration and mining.

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Northern Territory Weather

Northern Territory Map

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