Although we not so sure the few hundred people who still call Southport home consider themselves ghosts.

Official-speak says it is an abandoned town but at one time, Southport was even shaping up as the NT's main settlement, much more important than Darwin.

The town's name conjures up pictures of marinas, salt-streaked sailors and rum cocktails but it was anything but that.

It was a place hacked out of the wilderness with a jetty captive to the huge rises and falls of the Darwin Harbour tides, and remains that way today.

Those few hundred who call it home today are there because Southport was once seen as so important to the Territory's future and it was laid out as a town.

Today you can pick up a "lifestyle" block of a hectare or two for between $100,000-$200,000.

But get ready for a fight with the undergrowth and the lack of water if you do.

But there are streets, they have names, and plenty of bus shelters, just not as many buses.

This is a story, as so much of the NT's early history is, of Pine Creek as much as Southport.

Surveyor George Goyder and his gang had been dispatched by the South Australians to try and make something of their northern colony and arrived at the Darwin cliffs in 1869.

Just two years later, the course of history changed when workers digging the Overland Telegraph from Adelaide trying to reach Darwin (then called Palmerston) found gold at the bottom of a post hole.

The rush to Pine Creek began.

Darwin was clinging to the edge of the wonderful harbour but the tropical bush pressed on every side.

It was a terrible place to launch an expedition into the inland, the gold seekers found hacking through the wilderness impossible going, especially in the wet season.

Sailing ships laden with gold-seekers and their gear sailed as far inland as they could on the harbour.

Where they were forced to stop and throw out the anchor landed on what later became Southport.

They had steered right up the top of what is called Middle Arm, to a place bisected by the Blackmore and Darwin rivers.

Goyder by then no doubt had been alerted to the growing interest in Pine Creek and laid out a town at Southport, its streets named after members of his expedition.

Southport was used as a depot for the telegraph's construction teams but it boomed as gold seekers flooded in, literally on the high tide to the jetty perched among the mangroves.

The offloaded themselves, their transport in the way of horses and whatever else they could carry to keep themselves alive while they negotiated the hundreds of kilometres still to Pine Creek in outback NT.

It might not seem much today but it shaved as much as 50km off their trip.

Chinese came in their thousands, and many of them stayed.

They were boom times for Southport, multiple pubs, police station, stores, cemetery - the works, even a cordial factory.

But it was short lived.

After 20 or so years the town went into decline.

Again it was Pine Creek's fault, the gold was so abundant, and in many ways remains so today.

A railway, the Territory's first, was speedily constructed between Pine Creek and Darwin in 1888 - cutting Southport off.

The town's decline was as swift as its birth.

Just 20 years.

It was only the arrival of some upgraded radar towers late in World War Two (after the Darwin bombing) and the lifestylers who are really keen to get away from it all, or perhaps find a fishing base that gave Southport any cause to be mentioned at all.

There are some informative historical markers in the town should you ever choose to the visit, at the back of Berry Springs.

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