Tennant Creek

Tennant Creek

Tennant Creek, town, central Northern Territory, Australia. The town, the centre of a gold rush in the 20th century, is situated on Tennant Creek.

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The creek was visited in 1860 by the Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart, who named it for his sponsor, John Tennant. The earliest settlement of the site began in 1872 with the construction of a station on the Overland Telegraph Line. A gold rush followed the 1932 discovery of gold in the surrounding low, flat-topped hills, and the township of Tennant Creek was gazetted in 1934, but it was not officially proclaimed until 1954. The discovery in 1955 of copper and silver made Tennant Creek the Northern Territory’s leading mineral-production centre. A large smelter was built in the mid-1970s, but some of the mines’ output continues to be trucked to the railhead at Alice Springs (315 miles [507 km] south) via Stuart Highway. There are also deposits of tin, mica, and wolfram (tungsten) in the vicinity.

Beef cattle graze the countryside, and the town is a service centre for the cattle stations of the surrounding region. Tourist attractions include Karlu Karlu/Devils Marbles, a group of granite boulders up to 20 feet (6 metres) high, and another granite formation, a sacred Aboriginal site called Kunjarra (also known as the Pebbles). Pop. (2006) urban centre, 2,919; (2011) urban centre, 3,062.