Australia's most tropical city and the gateway to Kakadu — where the 1942 Japanese bombing of Darwin (the largest foreign attack ever on Australian soil) left an indelible imprint on the city's identity, Kakadu National Park's 20,000-year-old rock art is a 3-hour drive south, the monsoon season arrives in November like a wall of water and lightning that makes this the most dramatic sky on the continent, and the Mindil Beach Sunset Market runs every Thursday and Sunday through the dry season
Darwin (150,000; metro 160,000) is the capital of Australia's Northern Territory and the country's most geographically isolated state capital — 3,000 km from Adelaide (the next-nearest city), 2,700 km from Perth, and 1,500 km from Brisbane, linked to the Australian south by the Adelaide-Darwin railway (completed 2004) after decades of construction delays. The city's geographic position on the Timor Sea makes it Australia's gateway to Southeast Asia (Singapore is 3,200 km north — closer than Sydney), and Darwin's population is the most culturally diverse in Australia by proportion: Indigenous…
The Larrakia people (Saltwater people, in their own language 'Larrakia') occupied the Darwin Harbour area for tens of thousands of years before European contact — their country encompasses the entire Darwin peninsula and they are the recognised traditional custodians. Captain John Lort Stokes of HMS Beagle (the same vessel that carried Charles Darwin on his voyage of 1831–1836) named Darwin Harbour in 1839 in honour of his former shipmate. Darwin was essentially flattened twice in the 20th century: on February 19, 1942, 188 Japanese aircraft (the same pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor two mont…