NORTHERN TERRITORY, FLAG OF THE

Australian flag consisting of an ochre-red field (background) with a vertical black stripe at the hoist. A white Southern Cross constellation is on the stripe, and the field bears a stylized Sturt's desert rose with seven white petals around a black centre. Local symbols developed somewhat slowly in the Northern Territory. The Sturt's desert rose, which became the territorial floral emblem on July 12, 1961, recalls in its general shape the Commonwealth Star on the Australian national flag. The territorial coloursochre-red, black, and whitewere officially recognized on February 17, 1964, and are said to be associated with the Aboriginal peoples of the area. A flag consisting of a circular badge of white bearing an orange sun framed by two brown buffalo horns was approved (February 1972) for certain official purposes, but it was not flown by a large segment of the population. When self-government was established on July 1, 1978, the Northern Territory acquired its present flag, and its coat of arms was granted on September 11. Each design had been proposed as early as 1969 by the artist Robert Ingpen. The Southern Cross constellation on the black stripe is used on the national flag and on those of several Australian states; however, the flag of the Northern Territory is stylistically distinctive among Australian flags. Its unusual ochre-red background has been reproduced in various shades by flag manufacturers and book publishers. Whitney Smith History Prehistory and European exploration The Northern Territory is called a new country, but Aborigines probably have lived there for at least 40,000 years. The settlement pattern of Australian Aborigines, however, remains a mystery, as does their origin. Estimates of pre-European population range from 250,000 to 1,000,000, of which possibly one-sixth lived in the Northern Territory. Despite a multiplicity of tribal and clan structures, the cultural similarities between Aboriginal groupsin their indissoluble links to their lands and the importance of myth and ritual in maintaining those linksoutweighed the differences. Arnhem Land legends speak of the Baijini, seafaring people who came from the northwest long ago in search of the sea cucumber. These people may have been Chinese sailors, known to have reached nearby Timor early in the 15th century. They may have been Arab traders, who brought their swift dhows and the Islamic faith to the islands of eastern Indonesia later in the same century, or the Portuguese, who colonized Timor from 1506. The first confirmed contact between non-Aborigines and the Northern Territory, however, came with the Dutch, imperialist successors to the Portuguese in Indonesia. In 1605 the Duyfken, commanded by Willem Jansz, explored the eastern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Eighteen years later Willem van Colster in the Arnhem touched briefly at the northwestern tip of the land that today bears the ship's name. Pieter Pieterszoon (1636), Abel Tasman (1642 and 1644), and other Dutch voyagers followed. But the Dutch were traders, and the Aborigines, who had no trade goods, held little interest for them. Reports of their voyages may have helped to bring to Australia's north coast the Indonesian peoples, the Bugis and the Makasarese, who became known as Makasans. They came to the Northern Territory coast each year for sea cucumbers, possibly from the 17th or 18th centuries, though nearly all historical records of them date from the 19th century. The British naval surveyor Matthew Flinders met them on the Arnhem Land coast in 1802. Flinders' survey of the western shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria made him the first of a new breed of naval surveyors who worked for the rest of the century to make the oceans safe for British commerce. In 1803 the French navigator Nicholas Baudin in Le Gographe passed fleetingly along the western side of the territory coast, leaving a scattering of French names. But Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, son of the third governor of New South Wales, first charted that dangerous coast in a series of great voyages between 1818 and 1822. The last major gaps in the coastal survey of northern Australia were closed between 1837 and 1843 by John Clements Wickham and John Lort Stokes in HMS Beagle, the ship that had earlier carried Charles Darwin to South America during the 1830s. On Sept. 9, 1839, Stokes landed on the shores of a vast harbour and named it Port Darwin, after his old shipmate. British settlement The British desire to claim all of Australia and their belief that they could harness the trade of eastern Indonesia as the Dutch had in Java led to the establishment of three military settlements on the territory coast: Fort Dundas, Melville Island (182429); Fort Wellington, Raffles Bay (182729); and Victoria, Port Essington (183849). All failed when the trade did not come and when no challengers appeared to contest the British claim to Australia. Victoria's presence did attract the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, who made an epic overland journey from southeastern Queensland to Port Essington in 184445. In 185556 Augustus Charles Gregory, described by a contemporary as a most competent leader . . . with great firmness of purpose, led a well-organized expedition from the plains of the Victoria River eastward across the territory to the Queensland coast. In six expeditions between 1858 and 1862, the diminutive Scot John McDouall Stuart thrust northward through the Centralian deserts and reached the coast east of Port Darwin, distinguishing himself as one of the greater Australian explorers. The journals of Gregory and Stuart held out the promise of good cattle country. South Australia moved to acquire the land, and in 1863 the British government granted it to them. South Australian governments, short-lived and controlled largely by business interests until the 1890s, could find no way to turn a profit in the territory. Their first settlement, set up in 1864 at Escape Cliffs, northeast of Port Darwin, failed two years later through poor site choice and mismanagement. South Australia's surveyor general, George Goyder, successfully established Palmerston, on Port Darwin, in 1869. The Overland Telegraph line, spanning the continent from north to south in the early 1870s, joined Adelaide to the world and ensured the permanence of Palmerston. The town, renamed Darwin in 1911, has been the Northern Territory's capital city ever since. The telegraph-poling parties found traces of gold in the stony hills around Pine Creek, south of Darwin, and in 1872 gold-prospecting parties began to arrive through Port Darwin. Speculation, obstructive mining laws, poor ore bodies, and bad living conditions on the goldfields meant that mild boom was followed by major bust. By 1896 gold production had gone into irreversible decline. But gold brought developmentin the growth of Darwin and goldfields settlements, in the construction of the DarwinPine Creek railway (completed in 1889), and in the influx of Chinese immigrants. In 1888 the number of Chinese peaked at just over 7,000; Europeans numbered 1,009. Thereafter, restrictive immigration policies brought a steady decline, but the enterprising Chinese continued to dominate the goldfields and business in the northern part of the territory. In the south Alice Springs, founded as a telegraph station in 1870, grew into a small settlement. Its growth was stimulated by small gold strikes in the 1880s and, most importantly, by pastoralism. Since the late 19th century the vast cattle runs of the north have formed the basis of the territory's image, but sheep came first. In 1866 the westward movement of Queensland graziers brought sheep to the northern border area of the territory. Drought and recession forced them out within three years. In 1870 Ralph Millner led an epic drive of 7,000 sheep from South Australia to the Roper River, on the southern border of Arnhem Land. Cattlemen followed, traveling westward from Queensland into the northern section of the territory and northward from South Australia into the arid beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges country of Central Australia. Most of the great cattle stations of the Northern Territory were founded between 1880 and 1885, during a prosperous period in Australia. Victoria River Downs, which covered 8,364 square miles in 1908, was said to be the world's largest cattle run. Severe depression in the 1890s, aided by high transport costs, labour shortages, and cattle-killing Aborigines, sent the cattle industry into decline. Aboriginal groups, little affected by the early settlements and transient explorers, were devastated by the wholesale confiscation of their lands for stock leases. The pattern of Aboriginal resistance and savage white reprisal, established earlier in southern Australia, soon spread to the north, reaching a peak in the first decade of the 20th century, when the Eastern and African Cold Storage Supply Company employed gangs of armed men on their Arnhem Land station to shoot down wild Aborigines on sight. There were also notable examples of whites protecting blacks from punitive expeditions, and Aborigines gradually became the mainstay of the labour force on pastoral properties, but until the very last days of its Northern Territory rule in 1910, South Australia passed no protective legislation for its black citizens.