Challange: NT breaks Britannia

[Cockroach]

The following extract comes from an article writen by A.B. Paterson (or 'Banjo' Paterson as he is more commonly known) which was first published in the Bulletin in 1898

Britain, it is said, thinks of establishing a naval station at Port Darwin. But Britain beware! The Northern Territory has "broke" everybody that ever touched it in any shape or form, and it will break Britain if she meddles with it. The decline and fall of the British Empire will date from the day that Britannia starts to monkey with the Northern Territory.

Your goal is to make these words come true with a PoD after 1898.

Edit to add: I very much doubt 'Banjo' Paterson was being serious about the NT bringing down the British Empire... all the more reason for this to be a challange.

 

[Landshark]

You'd better fire up the time machine and go and tell Mr Paterson it took a decade of the most devastating wafare ever seen on the face of this planet to "break" the British Empire.

His patch of scrubland doesn't even come close.

 

[Melvin Loh]

Fort Dundas

Fellas, Britain's earliest attempts to settle the NT during colonial Australian times already were broken well and truly before Banjo Patterson's poem. There was a British military settlement on the NT coast at Fort Dundas made during 1824, and a sister settlement at Fort Wellington on nthe Coburg Peninsula in 1827, but by 1829 the whole damn place had been abandoned due to harsh weather and terrain, and lack of sustainable water supplies.

http://www.tiwilandcouncil.net.au/AboutUs/History/Dundas.htm

Hey, a different WI- could Fort Dundas have become from the late 1820s a 2nd Singapore as some officials in London had hoped ?

btw, boys, nice to see a TL about a place where I come from