The last decade of the nineteenth century was a tough time for South Australia's Top End settlement of Palmerston. The major industries of mining, pastoralism, and agriculture suffered from downturn, disease and distance. The South Australians had had enough of their 'white elephant' and, when Palmerston blew away in the Great Hurricane of 1897, the calls for the Northern Territory's return to the British Colonial Government grew louder.

But the Territory, as ever, was full of resilient and resourceful characters. They appear in these pages: judges, railway gangers, bushmen, buffalo hunters, hoteliers, Chinese miners, Aboriginal station hands, explorers, cross-country cyclists, murderers, and more.

Territorians were, as Banjo Patterson described them, full of 'booze, blow and blasphemy' - but even he couldn't wait to return.

Derek Pugh brings the Darwin of the 1890s alive. (Hon Sally Thomas AC).