About the Region
Life in the Barkly
Life is a lot simpler in the Barkly, the drive from your workplace to home is always less than five minutes. A jumper is only required on a winter’s night and your weekends will be spent lazing around enjoying the famous Barkly breeze taking the edge off the heat of the day.
With all of the amenities you need at hand and some of the most beautiful spots in Australia on your door step ready to explore. It’s easy to see why they say ‘life is a breeze in the Barkly’.
A strong mixture of services, retail and hospitality businesses means you won’t be asking what you can get in the Barkly, but what can’t you get in the Barkly. An excellent hospital and other great medical services. Fantastic schools with passionate staff, childcare facilities, playgrounds and plenty of sports for the kids to have a go at. Excellent eateries, pubs, and clubs; and our cafes means that there will always be a freshly brewed coffee to help kick start your Monday mornings. With some of the most beautiful landscapes in Australia and easy access to several of Australia’s tourism icons. It’s safe to say your life will be a breeze whilst living in the Barkly.
Quick Facts
- The Barkly region covers an area of 322,713 square kilometres (124,600 sq mi) and has a population of almost 7,400. The largest township in the Barkly is Tennant Creek which has a population of approximately 3,000 people.
- The Barkly gets 181 clear days annually and has a mean maximum temperature of 31.9 degrees and a mean minimum temperature off 19.8 degrees.
- The Barkly is not only accessible via road, rail and bus service, it also has scheduled flights from Alice Springs and Darwin to the Tennant Creek Airport.
- Tennant Creek has developed from its rough, tough droving and gold mining days into a modern town with shops and a supermarket, accommodation, bars, clubs and restaurants, a regional hospital, schools and banking facilities.
- Throughout the year there are many events in the Barkly including: the Desert Harmony Festival, the Tennant Creek Show, Horse Racing and Rodeos.
- A number of family-friendly infrastructure projects have either just been completed or are currently in construction, including the Lake Maryanne Playground, the Tennant Creek and Ali Curung Youth Centres and Purkiss Reserve upgrade.
Work
The Northern Territory is known as the place for boundless opportunity and the Barkly is the ultimate example of these opportunities.
Over 70% of Tennant Creek’s residents are in full-time work, compared to the national average of over 57%.
With a mixture of private and public sector jobs, there is a fairly even spread of jobs across the diverse occupations of professions in the Barkly, these include; community and personal service workers, clerical and administrative workers, managers and technicians and trades workers.
Offering such a diverse range of jobs across a variety of professions with a high demand for workers means working in the Barkly will fast-track your career and afford you opportunities it would normally take years to get in major metropolitan centres.
Visit
Located 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs and 1000 kilometres south of Darwin, with Tennant Creek at its golden heart, is the Barkly. Its large cattle stations, fascinating wayside inns, historic stock routes, gold mining history, Aboriginal culture, interesting flora and fauna and the iconic Karlu Karlu/Devils Marbles make up this beautiful outback region of the Red Centre.
Spend a day or two in Tennant Creek exploring its rich history and culture and enjoying the vast array of outdoor activities. The Barkly region is the outback Australian landscape you've always imagined: endless blue skies, vast desert horizons, and that electrifying sense that an adventure could be just around the corner. This part of Australia will show you just how enormous this beautiful country really is: the Barkly region alone is 323,514 square kilometres, which makes it bigger than Italy, the United Kingdom or New Zealand!
Visit the link below for more information on planning your trip to the Barkly.
Art and Culture
The Barkly has a diverse and vibrant arts and culture scene, with art centres in several remote indigenous communities, and a large tourist centre, the Warumungu-led Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in Tennant Creek, showcasing visual art and music, which is currently being upgraded.
Barkly Regional Arts works with many visual artists and musicians from five communities across the region, with a main arts centre in Tennant Creek where artists come to paint, talk and get creative, producing high quality artworks telling local stories that are often exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.
Also located at Barkly Regional Arts is the Winanjjikari Music Centre, which promotes, develops and produces music across many genres, providing rehearsal and recording spaces for musicians and a central meeting space to work.
A highlight of the Barkly arts and culture calendar is the annual Desert Harmony Festival, which attracts more than 3,500 people to gather in Tennant Creek for a week of activities, events, concerts and performances of music, showcasing the vibrant arts scene that exists and its deep connections to country.
Invest
Referring to the Barkly’s rich history in mining, they often call the Barkly the golden heart of the Northern Territory. That heart continues to beat strongly with some strong exploratory results leading to a number of new mining projects commencing in the near future.
Being in the heart of the Northern Territory also means the Barkly and more specifically Tennant Creek is located where the roadways from the East Coast of Australia, Southern Australia, and Darwin meet. Couple this with a freight rail line linking the North and South of Australia means the Barkly is starting to realise its strategic location from a logistical sense. Evidencing this is the development study into the establishment of a multi-modal facility and rail terminal at Tennant Creek, currently being undertaken.
The Barkly is renowned as being cattle country and agriculture continues to be a strong economic driver in the region. However a new type of farming is emerging, The Barkly has one of the highest solar irradiance resources on the planet. Meaning the energy sector is starting to look to the Barkly to produce clean, renewable energy via solar farms. The flagship of these projects is Sun cable’s plans to build the world’s largest solar farm in the Barkly which will eventually provide 20% of Singapore’s energy needs by 2027.
All of these opportunities, plus having Central Northern Territory’s service centre in the region, means there are plenty of opportunities in the Barkly for investors and business owners.
Contact the NTG’s Economic Development Manager, Rob Duncan on
08 8962 4675 for further information on how you can invest in the Barkly.
