The history phoenix? inventing a history tradition in the Northern Territory

Abstract

Voracious white ants, floods, fires, damp, decades of government failu res, neglect and other paper-destroying hazards destroyed much of the north's colonizing record. Its early ports, Fort Dundas, Fort Wellington and Fort Essington, were abandoned, then its administrative centre, the first Palmerston at Escape Cliffs, was deserted. The cyclones of 1897 and 1937 leveled the second Palmerston (renamed Darwin in I 911) while dramatic attacks during 1942 and 1943 by Japanese bombers during World War Two, again flattened much of the city. Another kind of cataclysmcolonialism- causcd the partial destruction oflndigenous peoples and their perspectives of history.