The Outback / Northern Territory

The arid interior and the tropical top end, which together make up most of Australia's area and hold almost none of its people. The Northern Territory was administered by South Australia from 1863, handed back to the Commonwealth in 1911 as unprofitable, and has never become a state; its parliament can be overridden by Canberra, as happened when it legalised euthanasia in 1995. The overland telegraph line built through the centre in 1872 connected Australia to the world and created Alice Springs as a repeater station. Cattle stations the size of small countries run on the semi-desert, historically staffed by Aboriginal stockmen paid in rations until the equal-wages decision of 1966 - which prompted the Gurindji walk-off at Wave Hill, the strike that became the land rights movement. The Territory is where that movement won: the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976 returned freehold title to roughly half the land, decades before the Mabo judgment reached the rest of the country. It also hosts Pine Gap, a joint American satellite facility whose function was concealed for years, and the Maralinga and Emu Field sites in South Australia where Britain tested nuclear weapons in the 1950s without clearing the Anangu from the land. Around thirty per cent of the Territory's population is Aboriginal, the highest proportion in the country. Uluru was returned to its traditional owners in 1985 and closed to climbers in 2019. Darwin was bombed by Japanese aircraft in February 1942, more heavily than Pearl Harbor. Cyclone Tracy destroyed most of the city on Christmas Eve 1974. Alice Springs sits near the geographic centre. Kakadu holds rock art tens of thousands of years old.

• Existed: 1869 CE – present
• Type: Entity