Guide to Daly Waters Northern Territory Australia

Daly Waters is located 274 kilometres south of Katherine near the junction of the Stuart and Carpentaria Highways. Despite the tiny population of the settlement, the Daly Waters’ Pub is one of the Territory’s most famous watering holes. The Pub is one of the oldest buildings in the Northern Territory: a quaint place armoured with corrugated iron, draped with bougainvillea and decorated with decades of memorabilia. The annual Daly Waters Rodeo is a Northern Territory institution not to be missed.

Daly Waters also has the distinction of being Australia’s first international airfield. It has an interesting aviation history. It was a centre for the London to Sydney air race of 1926, a World War II air force base and a refuelling stop for Qantas. The Daly Waters Hangar exhibits interesting facts, photographs and equipment from the areas’ former aviation glory days.

The area’s traditional Aboriginal owners, the Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun travelled through here on their way to the southern parts of the Northern Territory. When John McDouall Stuart explored around Daly Waters in the late 1800s, he and his party became lost in the region and were desperate for water, making their discovery of a small creek leading to a series of waterholes particularly significant.