By Dr Robyn Smith

The Northern Territory: A Litany of Failure by Murray McLaughlin is a series of 17 well-crafted chapters chronicling the evolution of hyper-arcadian politics of Australia’s northern frontier.

McLaughlin tracks ‘ownership’ of the Territory being transferred from colonial New South Wales to South Australia and, post-federation, on to the Commonwealth when the land of milk and honey—or in this case, boundlessly impossible pots of gold—failed to materialise.

The work is specifically focussed on Australia’s largely forgotten north where McLaughlin has spent the past 20-plus years as a journalist with the ABC, the Northern Land Council and Senator Patrick Dodson.

This experience well qualifies his account of how the north functions—because of and despite who we are, including our uncomfortable position in the federation.

McLaughlin’s work, written in accommodating journalese as a series of vignettes, is an exemplar of applied settler colonialism in contemporary Australia.

Historian Patrick Wolfe theorised that the colonial ‘logic of elimination’—genocide—doesn’t stop with the bullets; its inherently eliminatory nature is deployed by policies and practices systemically imposed on Indigenous populations of the invaded lands.

It follows, then, that those policies and practices serve to control and repress the Indigenous population while rapacious exploitation of land continues in the service of capitalism and profit for the beneficiaries of the colonising forces.

Each vignette is representative of the logic of elimination hard at work in the Northern Territory’s very own brand of settler colonialism, from Commonwealth ‘Protector’ Dr Cecil Cook through to the more contemporary tough-on-crime and zero tolerance rhetoric.

We discover (or rediscover) a range of public servants, journalists, political apparatchiks, lawyers, bureaucrats and hangers on.

Politicians, of course, do not escape. The book captures prime ministers, key ministerial players and their departmental heads, and every Chief Minister in the Territory’s relatively brief self-governing history.

Think king-of-the-kids, snap elections, silken honours, conflicts of interest, jobs for mates, failed midnight coups, performative tantrums, in-party fighting and the associated joys of day-to-day politics in this most misunderstood jurisdiction.

Think black-bashing.

It is self-government, McLaughlin writes, that is responsible for our fixation on the ubiquitous but ill-defined ‘Territory lifestyle’ that seems to confer its graciousness exclusively on Darwin’s leafy northern suburbs.

To that we can add the more generic pseudo-nationalistic brand of ‘territorianism’, which is known, loved and uttered on incessantly high rotation by those in power at the Legislative Assembly.

Individually and collectively, McLaughlin’s vignettes deal with the gargantuan struggle between Aboriginal people and those hell-bent on wresting their land and control of it for personal enrichment or political capital.

Among others, land battles featured pastoralists, the recreational and commercial fishing sectors, miners, agriculturalists and those spruiking projects that seemed (and proved) to be more SpaceX-ish than grounded in reality.

Many finished up in court; some remain there either awaiting decision or under appeal to a higher authority—all of this in a system established by settler colonials for settler colonials at the cost of the original owners and custodians of the land.

What we see is how the system has worked and continues to work in the service of those seeking to profit from these disputed lands.

Into the mix, McLaughlin drops some well-chosen quotations no doubt filed in a notebook of the old-fashioned variety for which we’d all pay a handsome access fee.

This is a timely and overdue work that will be a welcome addition to scholarship on the state of play in this largely out-of-sight-out-of-mind portion of Australia. Enthusiasts of Northern Territory history and politics will find it entertaining, instructive and invaluable.

The Northern Territory: A Litany of Failure by Murray McLaughlin, published by Wakefield Press, will be available November 15, 2026.