| Picnic Day | |
|---|---|
 Picnic Day in Pine Creek, 1937 | |
| Observed by | Northern Territory, Australia |
| Date | First Monday in August |
| 2023 date | August 7 |
| 2024 date | August 5 |
| 2025 date | August 4 |
| 2026 date | August 3 |
| Frequency | annual |
Picnic Day is a public holiday in the Northern Territory of Australia which takes place every year on the first Monday of August.
Picnic Day events in the Northern Territory date back to the late 1800s. [1] They were held in a variety of locations such as Adelaide River, Brunette Downs Station and Glencoe Paddock at differing times of year. [2]
A regular annual Union Picnic Day or Trade Picnic Day was observed at Adelaide River [3] by railway employees working on the North Australia Railway. [4] The date of the first event is not known. The event included Public Works employees on some occasions. [5] [lower-alpha 1] Between 1926 and 1935 a railway Picnic Day event was not held. An attempt was made to revive the holiday in 1933, [6] but it was not officially observed again until three years later. [7] On Monday 5 October 1936, a train transported people from Darwin to Adelaide River, leaving at 7 am returning at 11 pm. The hotel at Adelaide River recorded record sales and the train was "forced to stop often as a number of male Darwin passengers fell off at various points along the line". [8]
The Harts Range Races in Central Australia are held each Picnic Day long weekend. The races began in 1946, when three brothers Bennett, Qinton and Kil Webb from Mount Riddock Station raced stockman Jack Schaber and the regional policeman Senior Constable Bob Darken over a distance of about a mile to the Ulgarna Yards to determine who had the fastest horse. The event inspired the first formal racing meet at Harts Range in November 1947. It became an annual event. [9]
Darwin is the capital city of the Northern Territory, Australia. The city has nearly 53% of the Northern Territory's population, with 139,902 at the 2021 census. It is the smallest, wettest, and most northerly of the Australian capital cities and serves as the Top End's regional centre.
The Northern Territory is an Australian internal territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Australia to the west, South Australia to the south, and Queensland to the east. To the north, the territory looks out to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Western New Guinea and other islands of the Indonesian archipelago.
Alice Springs is a town in the Northern Territory, Australia; it is the third-largest settlement after Darwin and Palmerston. The name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd, wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. Known colloquially as The Alice or simply Alice, the town is situated roughly in Australia's geographic centre. It is nearly equidistant from Adelaide and Darwin.
Tennant Creek is a town located in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is the seventh largest town in the Northern Territory, and is located on the Stuart Highway, just south of the intersection with the western terminus of the Barkly Highway. At the 2021 census, Tennant Creek had a population of 3,080 people, of which 55% (1,707) identified themselves as Indigenous.
Stuart Highway is a major Australian highway. It runs from Darwin, in the Northern Territory, via Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, to Port Augusta in South Australia; it has a distance of 2,720 km (1,690 mi). Its northern and southern extremities are segments of Australia's Highway 1. The principal north–south route through the central interior of mainland Australia, the highway is often referred to simply as "The Track".
The former Central Australia Railway, which was built between 1878 and 1929 and dismantled in 1980, was a 1241 km (771 mi) 1067 mm narrow gauge railway between Port Augusta and Alice Springs. A standard gauge line duplicated the southern section from Port Augusta to Maree in 1957 on a new nearby alignment. The entire Central Australia Railway was superseded in 1980 after the standard gauge Tarcoola–Alice Springs Railway was opened, using a new route up to 200 km to the west. A small southern section of the original line between Port Augusta and Quorn has been preserved and is operated as the Pichi Richi Railway.
George Woodroffe Goyder was a surveyor in the Colony of South Australia during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
NAIDOC Week is an Australian observance lasting from the first Sunday in July until the following Sunday. The acronym NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. NAIDOC Week has its roots in the 1938 Day of Mourning, becoming a week-long event in 1975.
Adelaide River is a small but historically significant town located at the crossing of the Stuart Highway over the Adelaide River in the Northern Territory of Australia. The town is upstream of the Adelaide and Mary River Floodplains Important Bird Area. At the 2021 census, Adelaide River had a population of 317. Adelaide River is part of the Coomalie Shire and is the second largest settlement in the local government area.
The Australian Overland Telegraph Line was an electrical telegraph system for sending messages the 3200 kilometres between Darwin, in what is now the Northern Territory of Australia, and Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Completed in 1872, it allowed fast communication between Australia and the rest of the world. When it was linked to the Java-to-Darwin submarine telegraph cable several months later, the communication time with Europe dropped from months to hours; Australia was no longer so isolated from the rest of the world. The line was one of the great engineering feats of 19th-century Australia and probably the most significant milestone in the history of telegraphy in Australia.
Harts Range, officially registered as Hart Range, is a town in the Northern Territory of Australia located on the Plenty Highway 215 km (134 mi) by road northeast of Alice Springs. It is also the name of a mountain range, after which it was named. It has also been referred to as Hart's Range. The Plenty River runs to the north of the range and the town.
Many sports are played in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Southport is an outer rural locality in Darwin. It is based on the site of the abandoned Town of Southport, a thriving river port during the Pine Creek gold rush of the 1870s. It is located at the junction of the Blackmore and Darwin Rivers.
Paul Foelsche was a South Australian police officer and photographer born in Germany, remembered for his work in the Northern Territory of Australia from 1870 to 1904.
Adelaide River railway station is a former railway station on the now-closed narrow-gauge North Australia Railway, in the Northern Territory, Australia, 124 kilometres south of the Darwin terminus of the line. Now a museum with exhibits that include buildings, rolling stock and memorabilia, it is located on the main north–south road route through the Northern Territory, the Stuart Highway. It was one of the most significant stations on the line; the only station with a refreshment room. Former Commonwealth Railways diesel locomotive NSU 63 is displayed between the highway and the station.
Ted Ryko, born Edward Frederick Reichenbach was an Australian cyclist and photographer who broke the world record for cycling from Adelaide to Darwin in May 1914.
Mount Riddock Station is a 2,633 square kilometre cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is managed by Steve and Rebecca Cadzow. They run Poll Herefords on the property, which has organic certification.
Oakbank Racing Club, formerly the Onkaparinga Racing Club, is a thoroughbred horse racing organization in South Australia. It is responsible for the Oakbank Racecourse and running the events of the Easter Racing Carnival on that course, culminating in the Great Eastern Steeplechase.
Several survey parties were sent by the South Australian Government to the "Top End" of the Northern Territory during the years 1864–1870, preparatory to founding a settlement. This article describes those attempts and the people involved. It includes lists of all known participants.
Vicki Darken, née Victoria Ormond, was an Australian landscape painter, based in the Northern Territory.
