Tennant Creek is a small country town of 4000 people, situated 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs, and is the service centre for the area and mining town. It is surrounded by empty plains and vast blue skies. It is famous for being the last place in Australia that gold was discovered in 1925. The gold was found by one of the overland linesman and this led to the establishment of the town. The location had been already on the map by having one of the original telegraph repeater stations built there in 1872, and this is only one of the four remaining stations still in existence. South of Tennant Creek on the Stuart Highway, which follows the original line of the telegraph service, are the Devil’s Pebbles and further south the Devil’s Marbles, a mass of large weathered boulders. According to local legend these are eggs of the Rainbow Serpent, Aboriginal creation ancestors.
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