Destination of the week: N Territory
For the majority of Australians the Northern Territory – usually known as "the Territory", or simply "NT" – embodies the antithesis of the country's cushy suburban rim. The name itself conjures up a distant, frontier province – and, to an extent, this is still the case.
Only around one percent of Australians inhabit an area covering a fifth of the continent, which partly explains why the Territory has never achieved full statehood. Territorians play up the extremes of climate, distance and isolation that mould their temperaments and accentuate their tough, maverick image as outsiders in a land of "southerners".
The Territory attracts those wanting to escape their past, and it's a place where people ask few questions: most people were born elsewhere and that Australian institution, the "character", is in his element here, propping up the bars and bolstering the more palatable myths of the Territory's frontier history. The real "Crocodile Dundee" met his end here, and episodes like regular croc attacks and highway psycho killers help augment the Territory's untamed, Outback mystique.
The Territory's boundaries include some of Australia's oldest sites of Aboriginal occupation and some of the last regions to be colonized by Europeans. Darwin, the Territory's capital, is a prospering tropical town, while travellers from around the world flock to explore the Top End (as tropical NT is known), primarily Kakadu National Park's wildlife, waterways and Aboriginal art sites. Adjacent Arnhem Land, to the east, is also Aboriginal land – and out of bounds to casual visitors, although many tours now visit this never-colonized wilderness of scattered communities. Heading south you arrive at Katherine, where the main attraction is the nearby gorges within the Nitmiluk National Park.
By the time you reach Tennant Creek, 650km south of Katherine, you've left the interminable light woodland of the Top End and have begun to pass pastoral tablelands on the way to the central deserts surrounding Alice Springs. By no means the dusty Outback town many expect, Alice Springs makes an excellent base to explore the region's natural wonders, of which that famous monolith, Uluru – or Ayers Rock – 450km to the southwest, is but one of many.
This is one of the best areas to learn about the Aborigines of the Western Desert, among the last to come into contact with European settlers and the most studied by anthropologists.