Nhulunbuy exists for one reason: bauxite. After surveyors confirmed a vast deposit in the late 1950s, a company called Nabalco won the right to mine it and to build a deep-water port and an alumina refinery, and a town to house the workers. Construction in the late 1960s conjured a modern settlement out of remote savanna, complete with schools, a hospital and a golf course, eventually the largest town in east Arnhem Land and the fourth largest in the Northern Territory. Yet its legal foundation is unusual: it is a private mining town on a special-purpose lease over Aboriginal land, run since 1972 by a corporation rather than an ordinary council. The town was an island of company life set inside a much older Yolngu world.

The Yolngu at Yirrkala watched their country excised for the mine without being asked, and they did not stay silent. In 1963 they sent the Yirrkala bark petitions to Federal Parliament, framing a typed protest inside their sacred clan designs; when that failed to halt the project, clan leaders took Nabalco to court in the 1971 Gove land rights case. They lost that case, but the fight they began here forced the nation to confront Aboriginal land rights, helping bring about the 1976 land-rights act and, eventually, the Mabo decision. The town that triggered the dispute became, in time, a neighbour to the communities that won it. Visitors today need a permit from the Yolngu-run Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation simply to reach the surrounding beaches and country.

For four decades the refinery, by then owned by Rio Tinto, was the town's heartbeat. In November 2013 the company announced it would shut the alumina refinery, though not the bauxite mine, and in May 2014 production stopped. The blow was severe: around 1,100 jobs lost, the population falling by some 700, the airline route to Darwin so empty that flights were suspended. A town built around a single industry suddenly had to imagine itself without it. Services propped up by the company, the hospital, the schools, the power, the flights, were thrown into question, and residents braced for a long, uncertain reinvention. Nhulunbuy did not empty out, but it had to learn to be more than a refinery town.

Reinvention arrived from an unexpected direction: space. Sitting close to the equator, the Gove Peninsula is unusually well placed for launching rockets, and in 2019 the Arnhem Space Centre was announced nearby. In June 2022 NASA fired a series of suborbital sounding rockets from the site, the first time the agency had ever launched from a commercial spaceport outside the United States. The centre closed in late 2024 after a dispute over its land lease could not be resolved, and operations moved to Queensland. Still, for a brief and striking moment, a remote town that had defined itself by what it dug out of the ground found a new story in what it could send into the sky — a sign that bauxite country could imagine itself as a doorway to the stars.

Climb the hill the town is named for and the layers come into focus. At the summit of Nhulun, Mount Saunders, the Roy Marika Lookout, named for the Yolngu artist and land-rights leader, opens onto the Gulf of Carpentaria, the refinery, the harbour and the bush stretching away. White-sand beaches ring the town: Gadalathami, Dharrpamiwuy, Wirrwawuy, each with its Yolngu name. Eighteen kilometres south lies Yirrkala and its world-famous art. A locally made feature film, shot with an all-local cast, was once described as capturing the region's ethos, Yolngu and balanda building something together. That is, in the end, what Nhulunbuy is still trying to be.