Tennant Creek High School is a Northern Territory government school catering for students from Years 7 to 12. The population of the school is about 200 students of whom approximately half are Indigenous.
Tennant Creek is located approximately 1,000 kilometres south of Darwin and 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs. Tennant Creek was established as a mining town in the 1930s during Australia's 'last gold rush'. Tennant Creek is no longer solely a mining town; tourism, the Adelaide to Darwin railway, government services and the pastoral industry, as well as renewed mining, are pivots of the local economy. The population tends to be transient like many other parts of the Northern Territory. Many people come on short-term contracts or spend only one or two years before 'heading back down south'. This results in only a few extended family networks existing in the town.
