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Home › Destination Search › NT › Down the Track, Northern Territory
Down the Track, Northern Territory
 The Stuart Highway linking Darwin to Alice Springs and the southern states is the main north-south artery through the heart of Australia.
The town of Katherine, 340 km from Darwin, is the third largest town in the Territory and the first major stop on the journey south. Situated on the banks of the Katherine River, it is far enough south to avoid the humidity of the tropics and far enough north to avoid the desert.
Like Alice Springs, Katherine owes its existence to the construction of the Overland Telegraph. This allowed the area to be opened to pastoralists and, in 1879, the first group of settlers and animals arrived from Adelaide to establish the first outback station at Springvale.
The most significant tourist attraction in the area is Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) National Park. Here, the Katherine River has carved thirteen spectacular gorges through the sandstone of the Arnhem Plateau, with cascades and waterfalls tumbling down the rocks between the deep waters of the gorges. There are over 100 km of walking tracks through the park, and many visitors choose to canoe through the gorges to appreciate the full beauty and tranquillity of the area.
One hundred and seven kilometres south of Katherine is Mataranka. This area is the 'Never Never' of Mrs Aeneas Gunn's classic Australian story We of the Never-Never – a tale of isolation and alienation in a homestead impossibly distant from anything at all. These days Mataranka is known for the small tourist park where stands of cabbage tree palms and paperbarks surround a superb thermal pool.
Once you reach Tennant Creek, you're within outback spitting distance of Alice Springs – provided you're a good spitter. You still have 504 km to go. But distance and government warnings about the harshness of the area did nothing to discourage those hopefuls intoxicated by a whiff of gold, and the subsequent rush to the area in the early 1930s resulted in the gazetting of the township of Tennant Creek.
Significant strikes of both gold and copper did indeed follow, and Tennant Creek is now the administrative centre for an area slightly larger than the whole of Victoria.
operators in Down the Track, Northern TerritoryAustralian Walking Holidays ha... More »7 day air tour from Melbourne<... More »NT map
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