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After the war, Harcourt Hilton Long became eligible for assisted further education with the Commonwealth
Reconstruction Training Service that encouraged ex-service personnel to gain tertiary and other qualifications
before re-entering the civilian workforce. He used this opportunity to attend the University of Melbourne and he
graduated in 1952 as a Bachelor of Architecture with a postgraduate Diploma of Town and Regional Planning.
For the next five years, he worked for the Town Planning Board in Victoria and the Regional Planning Authority,
Melbourne, during which time he married Nonie Wright whom he had met when she was a librarian at the
Architecture Library at the University of Melbourne. She later became Acting Librarian-in-Charge of the Northern
Territory Library Service.
Long returned to Western Australia in 1958 to become a senior planning officer for the West Australian Town
Planning Department. Again, he travelled northwards into the tropics, this time to participate in the planning of
the new towns of Exmouth and Kununurra. Kununurra is unusual for a regional centre in Australia. It was planned
not only as a service centre but also as accommodation for the farmers who were moving onto the lands newly
irrigated from the Ord River Project. The farmers were to commute from Kununurra. The design of the town
exhibits several of the features that were later to become incorporated into Harcourt Long’s urban designs in the
Top End. These included the avoidance of ribbon development and the siting of the built-up areas away from the
major through roads. The main commercial and public amenity centre was situated at the heart of the town on a
crescent shaped road that acted as a hub from which streets radiated in an irregular pattern.
The success of the Kununurra design brought Harcourt Long to the attention of the Northern Territory
Administration, which was planning to expand its town planning operations. Darwin had had an extremely
chequered history of urban planning and development. The ramshackle town that had grown up within Goyder’s
neat rectilinear plan had spilled around the coast and had expanded towards the airport. In 1944, the Commonwealth
decided to acquire all Darwin land to facilitate the re-planning and rebuilding of the bombed town. All land was
acquired in 1945 but throughout the 1950s town planning was ‘relatively stagnant’. By the early 1960s, it became
apparent that the population was rising quickly. There was a shortage of residential lots and new urban areas were
urgently needed. The suburbs of Ludmilla, The Narrows, Nightcliff, Rapid Creek and Larrakeyah (Kahlin) were at
various stages of development as was Stuart Park that was cleared of wartime buildings. Alice Springs, Katherine
and Tennant Creek also saw some reconstruction and subdivision. Plans were also under way to extend the city
of Darwin beyond Rapid Creek towards Lee Point for a proposed population increase of 20 000 and an aerial
photographic survey of Darwin to the 16 Mile was carried out with a view to future growth for a population of
100 000.
From 1960 it became apparent that the administration of town planning needed a thorough revision and in 1963
Harcourt Long returned to Darwin to help set up a separate town planning section within the Lands and Survey
Branch which was reorganised when the Town Planning Ordinance came into effect in 1964. The Administration’s
annual report states with obvious satisfaction: ‘Town planning activities have been stimulated by the appointment
of a town planner with wide experience and specialist qualifications’ and there had been a start to ‘investigations
leading to preparation of an overall plan for the City of Darwin’.
In 1964 with a growth rate of nine per cent annually, Darwin was second only to Canberra. In 1969, it was
calculated that with a compound growth rate of twelve per cent Darwin would reach 100 000 by 1979. Alice Springs
and Katherine would grow to 8 000 and 2 000 respectively by 1980. In hindsight, we can see that these figures
were overestimates but they meant that planning had to consider phenomenal growth that was not tied to the usual
demographic influences of regional economic activity and natural population increase.
In an attempt to provide for an integrated control of planning and development, Long’s response was to plan
urban ‘districts’ as nodes of urban growth separated by wide bands of reserved lands and the tide. They were
to be interconnected by arterial roads and future ferry services. This approach was later implemented in the
building of the northern suburbs, the new town of Palmerston and the current (1994) plans for developments at
Gunn Point, Weddell and beyond. The concept of modular planning had never been realised in Australia before
and was described by Long as ‘the latest thinking in growth form’. One of his major concerns was that Darwin
would continue to enjoy its coast and that these ‘islands’ of urban growth would allow easy access to the beaches
and harbour which are the city’s ‘greatest amenity’. He advocated the preservation of mangroves and coastal
rainforests, and the retention of the Darwin city centre as the geographical as well as administrative heart of the
envisaged metropolis. This concept presupposed the eventual urbanisation of Cox Peninsula with a view to future
development extending to port facilities at Bynoe Harbour and Port Patterson.
This was later to have significant implications in the Kenbi Land Claim. In support of the Northern Territory
Government’s attempt to define Cox Peninsula as ‘land in a town’ he stated that he had always planned for eventual
urbanisation west of the harbour and that his ‘mind recoiled at any concept of creating a metropolitan region
wherein the political centre was separated from the geographical centre’. In 1964 he tried to convince the federal
government to ‘kick start’ development on Cox Peninsula by building an accommodation subdivision for workers
on the Radio Australia relay station. This housing with its attendant town water, sewage system, and transport
improvements was to be the harbinger of a city surrounding the harbour. Only the Mandorah ferry services have
eventuated.
Each ‘district’ was planned to have one secondary school and commercial centre, and was composed of several
650 household ‘neighbourhood units’ each with its own primary school, oval and local shops as its ‘nucleus’.
Servicing the ‘neighbourhood’ were smaller parks and roads designed to provide local access but ‘exclude or
make unprofitable’ through traffic. Through traffic was accommodated by peripheral roads that feed onto the broad
arterial routes. The regular grid of suburban streets so loved by earlier planners and surveyors was assiduously
avoided. From 1964 onwards Harcourt Long put his ideas into the detailed planning of the ‘neighbourhoods’ as