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' I begin with this quote from Ernestine Hill because her description of the Northern Territory as 'problem child of empire' evocatively captures the paradoxical nature of the 'north' in the settler-Australian imagination - from the moment British settlement pushed further inland and north in the mid-nineteenth century, the north of the continent, the Northern Territory in particular, has simultaneously been construed as both a 'promised land' and a 'white elephant'.' (Publication abstract)
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Epigraph : Here I give you history galloping wild for a century over half a million square miles, the life-story of a colony in quicksand… A nameless land, a land without a flag, a vague earth bordered by the meridians of God… Black men and white men riding in a world without time and where sons do not inherit, and money goes mouldy in the pocket, where ambition is wax melted in the sun, and those who sow may not reap. I write of the Northern Territory of Australia, problem child of empire, land of an ever-shadowed past and ever-shining future, of eternal promise that never comes true. —Ernestine Hill, The Territory, 1951
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