Informit article: The problem child of empire

I begin with this quote from Ernestine Hill because her description of the Northern Territory as ‘problem child of empire’ evocatively captures the paradoxical nature of the ‘north’ in the settler-Australian imagination – from the moment British settlement pushed further inland and north in the mid-nineteenth century, the north of the continent, the Northern Territory in particular, has simultaneously been construed as both a ‘promised land’ and a ‘white elephant’.