The 1880s started with a boom in Palmerston and the Top End. South Australian investors flocked to put their money into gold mines, sugar and coffee plantations, and the pastoral industry. Cattle stations bigger than a British county were carved out of the bush. The Overland Telegraph Line stretched across the continent, and the Top End was alive with Aborigines, explorers, agriculturalists, pastoralists, and reef miners. Then came the railway builders, pearl divers, Chinese ‘Coolies’, and ‘misfits, missionaries and mercenaries’.The story of Palmerston (Darwin) and the Top End in the 1880s is a story of murder and mayhem, fortunes won and lost, challenges taken up, tragedies unfolded, and golden opportunities grasped by extraordinary men and women. It was they who began to turn this remote area of Australia into what it is today, and they who forged a new Australian identity – that of the ‘Territorian’.With a foreword by His Honour the Honourable Austin Asche AC QC, the 13th Administrator of the Northern Territory.
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