Source : the age
There’s a communal bar at Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris. Territorians would call it fancy, not because it serves expensive French champagne, it doesn’t; but because the beer’s icy cold.
The further into the Top End you go, the harder it is to get a cold drink. The diesel to feed the generator keeping the fridge running has to come from Darwin, five hours’ drive down a bumpy dirt road. Come the wet season, the road’s impassable.
Sunsets don’t get prettier, or more private, than here.
There’s a bloke holding court by the bar; he barely comes up to my chest. But he’s got a croc story to tell. Says he got stuck at a creek crossing not far from here. His 4WD stalled, he got out in knee-deep water and a four-metre-long croc grabbed him by the leg. He rolls up his trousers: there’s no skin, just scar tissue.
“Don’t tell me you wrestled it?” I ask him.
“Nah, just won the screaming contest,” he answers with a chuckle.
Travel the whole country and you won’t find another place like Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris. Jabiru, the main township of outback tourist icon, Kakadu National Park, might be barely 20 minutes away by air; but this place is its own private wonderland, overlooked by all but the few of us gathered around the bar swapping croc stories.
This part of Arnhem Land is home to some of the most significant Aboriginal art on Earth.
Located on land owned and managed by the Amurdak people, who’ve been here over 50,000 years, this 700-square-kilometre parcel of Arnhem Land is considered one of the planet’s richest Indigenous cultural sites, home to thousands of paintings from 100 to 30,000 years old.
You might get in during the dry season by road, but the view from a Cessna on its way into a red earth airstrip is worth the extra tariff. Below me are nothing but rugged sandstone ranges fringed by billabongs, flood plains, paperbark swamps and monsoonal rainforest. Thousands of travellers descend on Kakadu every dry season, but few come here. There are 20 cabins spread across the bush outside the bar, but they’re never full, and anyway, management’s policy is to keep numbers to a minimum.
It’s dangerous beyond the lodge, I’m warned on arrival. Salt-water crocs can walk long distances across floodplains. But I’m soon in a Land Cruiser riding down mud tracks among forest into escarpment country. It takes only a minute or so to feel like I’m deep in Amurdak territory. The evidence of the thousands of years they spent here is everywhere. At the end of a dirt path that climbs towards huge boulders, I slide on my back under overhangs to find rock art.
There’s plenty of comfort here – but don’t expect gold trims.
The passage of time hasn’t faded the paintings, and I wonder just how many people have ever seen them. Plenty are easy to, access too. Perhaps the most spectacular painting – a six-metre-long rainbow serpent painted in white and ochre – is barely 10 minutes’ drive from the lodge.
Buffalo hunter-turned-environmentalist Max Davidson first came here in 1985. By the following year, he’d set up a tourist venture with traditional owners. He’d travelled all over the Top End but he hadn’t seen anything quite like this place. That sense of discovery is still palpable here, 40 years on. I’m enthralled by what I’ll find on my first boat ride through water channels between paperbark trees.
You’re going to see a lot of these creatures at Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris.
Then we hit a huge estuarine crocodile lolling in the shallows. The impact – and the subsequent splashing by the spooked croc – nearly knock me over the side of the boat. We make it out of the channels and into a lake in time for a fiery Territory sunset. There are more than 275 species of birds in these wetlands; had I come in September, 40,000 magpie geese would’ve joined the show.
There are huge crocs all over, lurking in many waterways we motor down. But it’s the sense of history that awes me most. I can feel it pulsing out of the Earth all around me – 1000 and more generations of ancient people who lived here long before, whose ghosts linger long. I find paintings no anthropologist has seen. Off one trail I find human skulls and bones lodged in the crevices of rocks, and middens collected and stacked across thousands of years.
There’s rock art all over – some of it just a short drive from the lodge.
There are swimming holes too, with sandy bottoms and crystal-clear waters. I’m a regular in the swimming pool beside the lodge too, since I know it’s 100 per cent safe from a croc encounter. Until I reach the bar next door, of course.
THE DETAILS
FLY
Fly to Darwin, then take a flight with Air Frontier from Darwin (from $775 pp each way) or Jabiru (from $300 pp each way) or drive five hours by 4WD from Darwin. Flights can be booked with Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris
STAY
Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris offer all-inclusive stays in a standard or deluxe cabin, including excursions, permits and meals from $1000 per person twin share (two night minimum)
The writer travelled as a guest of NT Tourism
