Overview
The Litchfield Shire could fairly claim "we have it all" in terms of the rich history of Australia's Top End. Certainly it would be difficult to find any region elsewhere which has the same extensive representation of significant historic themes within its area.The land of the Shire is the traditional home of the Larakia, Woolner and Djowei Aboriginal people.
In1644 navigators began to sail past the shores at the northern end of the Shire. They took little interest in the area until after the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the British decided to establish short lived military outposts on Melville Island and Cobourg Peninsula.
The British sailed away from the area in 1849, but by then colonists in the southern parts of Australia were beginning to look north. The explorer Leichhardt came overland from the Brisbane area to Port Essington in 1844/45 and a decade later A.C. Gregory overlanded to Brisbane in the opposite direction, beginning from the Victoria River.
Gregory reported that he saw very useful grasslands around the Victoria. That report attracted notice in South Australia, where ambitious settlers were looking for fertile and well watered land which it seemed their colony was short of.
That ambition was the catalyst for the explorations of John McDouall Stuart, Australia's most persistent and in many ways most successful explorer. In 1862, at his fifth or sixth attempt, depending on how the count is kept, Stuart reached the north coast at a point about 150 kilometres east of Darwin. South Australians were delirious with joy - they believed that Stuart had found the way overland to a fertile tropical region, capable of abundant production of all sorts of crops, minerals and livestock. It was a tropical region which, they deluded themselves into believing, contained all the resources and potentials which South Australia itself lacked.
Further, it was close to Asia. Therefore there would be all kinds of opportunities for trade. Surely, the South Australians reasoned, the products of the fertile north would be in demand in Asia. For similar reasons, it the north coast would be the place to built a port and terminus for a "land bridge" railway, a railway which would capture for Adelaide all of Australia's trade with near northern countries. It would also be the ideal place to take a telegraph line overland so that it could be linked up with a telegraph cable brought under the sea from Java. The connection would give Australia its first telecommunications with the outside world.
High ambitions indeed, especially for a colony which had only been established since 1836. But the South Australians were brave and determined and they immediately began to lobby the British government for the transfer of the region to their immediate north to their control. Hitherto, the region was part of New South Wales, but that colony had done nothing to settle or develop it.
The British colonial authorities yielded to the South Australian entreaties, and on 6 July 1863 the "Northern Territory of South Australia" was created, to be governed as a province of South Australia until it was able to stand on its own feet as a colony.
No sooner had this been done than South Australia began to plan for the settlement of the north coast regions of what was now the Northern Territory. They resolved to finance development and settlement by selling land in the Territory. The proceeds of the land sales would finance survey and infrastructure development.
That decision was the catalyst for the exploration and settlement of what is now the Litchfield Shire area. It brought a survey and settlement party to the mouth of the Adelaide River in 1864. Within three years that initial settlement attempt had failed, but the area of the Litchfield Shire was made much better known. Its potential as an agricultural and pastoral area was attracting attention.
From 1869 the area was successfully surveyed by Goyder's men, who established a base in Port Darwin and from there worked systematically through the hinterland. The Litchfield Shire area was on the map.
The South Australians were soon to learn that settlement did not necessarily follow land speculation and survey. Goyder had laid out three towns in what is now the Litchfield Shire, but only one of them, Southport, became a reality, albeit briefly. The agricultural land had at first been keenly sought, but little settlement or development occurred on any of them.
However, the South Australians did succeed in their ambitions to build an Overland Telegraph line and the first stages of a Transcontinental Railway. The routes for both these developments traversed the area which is now Litchfield Shire, and encouraged some modest and erratic settlement and development.
Agriculture was tried. Fortunes were spent on production of crops like coffee, rubber and sugar. Generally speaking, the crops grew but lack of markets and other problems doomed the ventures. Again, failure added to the knowledge of the north.
Primary production subsided to less ambitious pastoral activity - principally beef cattle and buffalo hunting for hides. The industries were conducted on much the same hunting and gathering basis as Aborigines had used the land for time immemorial. Cattle were mustered according to opportunity and market demand, buffalo were shot on the open range. In neither case was there any considerable expenditure on fixed improvements because returns simply did not justify that.
The next radical change occurred on the eve of World War Two, with the defence emergency bringing troops into the area and taking water out, from Howard Springs pending completion of Manton Dam. During the war itself the area of Litchfield Shire became Australia's frontline, the first line of defence against the invasion which was expected daily in the months following the air raids of 19 February 1942.
Men were rushed into the area to defend the beaches in the north of the Shire area and to hold the line along the north - south road (now the Stuart Highway). Hughes, Livingston and Strauss airstrips became critical venues in a bitter air war over northern skies. It was from Hughes that the first counter- attacks against the Japanese were launched, it was from Livingstone and Strauss that fighter aircraft flew to defend the north. Gradually, the fortunes of war were turned in Australia's favour.
The legacies of the war included the Stuart Highway and a national commitment to develop the north, on the basis that the best defence against future emergencies would be a populated and productive north. That spirit, and a huge investment of American money, underwrote the Humpty Doo rice project in the 1950s. Magpie geese got the blame for the project's failure, but there were many other reasons. Today, the Fogg Dam conservation area and nearby farms are legacies of a huge project which many thought would transform the coastal plains into the world's rice bowl.
The road to Beatrice Hill and beyond, now the Arnhem Highway is another legacy of that period. Gradually smaller scale farming, then residential and commercial development began along that road and on the Stuart Highway approaches to Darwin. People began to settle in the area in increasing numbers, seeking rural lifestyles and perhaps the chances to combine a city job with horticulture on a rural block.
That trend has given the Litchfield area its present character. It is an area which is a strongly contributing part of the Greater Darwin area and yet maintains its own identity as a distinctive district and a last stronghold of the fabled Territory individuality.
The story of the Litchfield Shire area has been the story of hopes, ambitions, failures and successes in Australia's north. It is a very Australian story which tells of notable human endeavour in the past. It may well also be a story which, when carefully read, points the way to Australia's future.