History
The first recorded match of Australian Football in Darwin was played in February 1916 on Darwin Town Oval.
The Northern Territory Football League chose to play in the Northern Territory's 'wet season', primarily due to hard playing surfaces during the 'dry season'. Most other leagues in Australia operate during the winter, but since the Territory does not have a winter, it is played at different times. The Wanderers Football Club were the founding members of the league in 1916.
John Pye and Andy Howley introduced Australian rules football to the Tiwi Islands in 1941, which grew to become the most popular sport on the islands. The Tiwi Islands Football League is a strong competition which feeds players into the NTFL. Skills of the TIFL players are widely celebrated. The TIFL Grand Final is the largest event on the island and a major tourist drawcard.
In 1991, Marrara Stadium was increased in capacity, and became the new home for the NTFL and AFL matches.
In 1991, Darwin hosted the first Arafura Games, the first international competition to include the sport of Australian Rules, and local teams have competed against nations from around the world. The city has hosted the games since.
Since the late 1990s, the Aboriginal All-Stars have captured the imagination of indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory, and have gained a huge amount of support.
Read more about this topic: Australian Rules Football In The Northern Territory
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)