DARWIN LOCAL HISTORY

Travelling past on the HMS Beagle in 1839, Captain J.C. Wickham named the area after Charles Darwin, who is probably the ship's most famous passenger. The town was renamed Palmerston in 1869, but reverted to Darwin in 1911.

When Europeans first arrived there was a substantial Aboriginal population, speaking hundreds of different languages and living a culture that dates back some 50,000 years. As in other places throughout Australia, there was conflict between locals and settlers. However, the population was not devastated as elsewhere and today about a third of the population are Aboriginal.

In 1942 the Japanese imperial forces attacked Darwin in a series of air raids that would last over a year. The city, indeed the whole of Australia, was unprepared for these attacks, which represented the strongest attempt to invade Australia since Europeans first settled in 1788. The attacks targeted civilian infrastructure as well as military establishments and destroyed most of the city. This destruction and the fear of invasion caused more than half the civilian population to flee.

On Christmas Day, 1974 Darwin experienced its most famous and most devastating historical event - Cyclone Tracy. This was the worst natural disaster in Australia's history, and over 90 per cent of all buildings in the city were seriously damaged. Fortunately, the human impact was less daunting and most of the population was evacuated. The subsequent rebuilding of the city makes the built environment unique in its modernity.