AUSTRALIA

Down Under and Over the Top

Jeff Burdick

In Australia, the exotic is commonplace. There are koalas and kangaroos, inverted seasons, the Great Barrier Reef and that wonderful Aussie accent. But as exotic as Australia generally is, the tropical Top End region of the Northern Territory is even more so. Added into the mix are crocodiles that still rule bays and rivers, Australia’s richest Aboriginal areas and a remoteness that makes the region one huge, undeclared wildlife sanctuary.

Geographically speaking, the Top End is the chunk of land that tops off the Northern Territory and, in turn, the entire Australian subcontinent. It’s a tropical oasis surrounded on three sides by hard-scrabble Outback and to the north by the Timor Sea. Though a world away from the urbanity of a city like Sydney, it’s only a three-hour jet flight away.

I flew into Darwin, the largest city in both the Northern Territory and the Top End. For my first day, I joined a day-trip to Litchfield National Park. The park is a popular picnic spot 80 miles south of Darwin, and the first wonder I saw was a field of huge termite mounds (photo left), one an astounding 20 feet tall. The main portion of the park though lies atop a sandstone plateau carved by numerous waterfall-fed pools. Not only were these swimming holes intoxicatingly cool, but, thanks to the park’s elevation, they were also crocodile-free (no minor feature in a region where harbors are “mined” with 15-by-9-foot croc-traps baited with whole chickens.)

Another feature of Litchfield is its proximity to several outstanding billabongs on which scenic cruises are conducted. A billabong is an Aboriginal word that refers to a seasonally formed backwater. During the Top End’s six-month rainy season of November to April, billabongs fill up and flow as part of vast river systems. An average of 55 inches of rain falls during this season, which Top Enders call "the Wet." During the next six months, almost no rain falls and the Top End starts drying up. It’s during "the Dry" that many floodplains and river arteries evaporate and create trapped backwaters where wildlife sustains itself until the next Wet.

The billabong my group cruised teemed with life. We saw wallabies foraging in the grass, wild pigs rutting in mud and barramundi fish leaping from the water. We also saw at least 30 crocodiles, including a huge saltwater variety that grows up to 20 feet long, and thousands of birds that included cockatoos, eagles, pelicans, egrets, cranes, king fishers, jabiru storks and webbed-feet jacanas, the latter colloquially known as Jesus birds for their ability to walk on lily pads.

Following my Litchfield trip, I spent the next day in Darwin. For an end-of-the-road town of only 85,000, Darwin is anything but a lazy tropical town. Its downtown pulses long into the night with a wide variety of restaurants, pubs and night markets. There are also wildlife parks, crocodile farms, Aboriginal craft shops, book exchanges, multiplexes, hovercraft harbor rides, fishing charters, a casino, WWII historical sites and the notable Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Darwin is also one of Australia’s most multi-ethnic cities. It’s home to 70 different nationalities and, as Australia’s closest gateway to Asia, Darwin has attracted tens of thousands of immigrants from around the Pacific Rim. Darwin’s museums, restaurants and night spots reflect this infusion, but nowhere is it more evident than at the open-air markets held throughout the Dry. The most popular is the Thursday night Mindil Beach Market (5-10pm), a can’t-miss attraction that weekly draws 7,000 to 10,000 attendees. The market includes 60 foodstalls, cuisine from 20 different countries and over 150 arts-and-crafts booths. When not perusing the market, locals like to spread their lawn chairs and coolers across the beach and watch the sun set on the Timor Sea.

The exotic cultures most associated with the Top End are of the indigenous variety. Aborigines have lived here for over 50,000 years, and from Darwin, three excellent Aboriginal areas are reachable: Kakadu National Park; the Aboriginal homeland of Arnhemland; and the Tiwi Islands of Melville and Bathurst. The length of my stay allowed me to visit all three, but most visitors have time for just one or two. The Tiwi Islands are perfect for one-day tours. Because of its size and 160-mile east distance from Darwin, Kakadu requires at least two or three days. Likewise Arnhemland, which borders Kakadu to the east, requires an extended stay, but as access there is more restricted, touring its marvels is more expensive.

I started my immersion into Aboriginal Australia with a four-day trip that combined a drive through Kakadu with a three-night stay at a safari camp. Ideally, I wish I had more time in Kakadu, but I consoled myself with the fact that whether one spends one day or one week there, nobody ever sees it all. Kakadu is Australia’s Yellowstone, covering 7,300-square miles of plateaus, savanna, monsoon forests and wildlife estuaries. Only two main roads cut through the park, plus a small number of paved and unpaved secondary roads. Four-wheel drive vehicles make additional off-road sections accessible, but Kakadu is so vast that long-forgotten Aboriginal art sites are rediscovered every year and added to the park’s catalog of 5,000 locations.

During my drive-through of Kakadu, I made time for an hour hike around the Ubirr Plateau, one of Kakadu’s major sights. Ubirr is notable for its excellently preserved examples of Aboriginal X-ray art painted thousands of years ago onto rock walls beneath cliff overhangs. Subjects drawn include: body outlines and the bone structures of warriors, fish, marsupials; mystical figures from Dream-Time lore; and allegorical tales once used to instruct children. The view from the top of the plateau was also stunning, opening on a seemingly prehistoric vista of stone, wetland and tropical vegetation.

In the afternoon, I crossed the East Alligator River into Arnhemland, where I caught my 4WD transfer to the safari camp. From Ubirr, it took more than two hours of dirt-road driving, but when I reached camp, I wasn’t disappointed. Located in the Mount Barradaile Valley 15 miles from Van Diemen Gulf, the camp represented but a small human footprint in an otherwise completely untamed setting. All supplies are either flown or driven in from Darwin.

During the day, we drove to trail heads and bush-hiked for hours to dramatic caves and overhangs covered with Aboriginal art.

These remote galleries surpassed anything else I saw in Australia. Often, different epochs of art are layered one atop another to create a dazzling mural of Aboriginal cultural history. During the hikes, our guides also taught us about the nutritional and pharmaceutical qualities of traditional plants used by Aborigines. In evenings, we could either drive to a nearby natural swimming hole or join a sunset cruise on the local billabong. Come dark, everyone returned to camp for dinner and would share stories long into the star-filled night.

I could have stayed for a week, but once back in Darwin, I consoled myself with a last Aboriginal sidetrip—this one to the Tiwi Island of Bathurst located 45 miles north of Darwin. The Tiwi people operate their own one- and two-day trips, and I took a one-day tour that included a morning tea, native dancing, a local museum, lunch and roundtrip air from Darwin.

Tiwis are known for an attractive style different from that of other Aboriginal artists. Utilizing bright colors and earth tones, these designs use either a repetition of diagonal lines or concentric curves around such central animal figures as a sea turtle, peacock or wallaby. The tour took us past many schools, houses, public buildings and even outhouses painted with such designs.

We also visited several craft studios/stores, but the highlight for me occurred after lunch when I followed my Aboriginal guides for an unscheduled hike. While the rest of my group lay on a secluded beach, my guide and I plunged into a seaside mangrove forest. We all hiked barefoot, and the forest quickly became so dense with the thick mangrove roots that we had to walk atop them, sometimes as high as four feet above the muddy forest floor. One of my guides carried an axe, which he occasionally sank into fallen trees. He eventually struck gold with a tree lying near a stream. When his axe ripped into the tree, wood chips exploded everywhere, and long, white worms oozed out. Greedily, the Aborigines scooped these up and s lurped ’em down like strands of spaghetti.

Being polite hosts, they offered me one. I accepted half—about six inches worth—and downed it before too many tapeworm connotations sprang to mind. It tasted slimy and salty like a muddy oyster. I declined any more, but savored no less this last exotic taste of Australia’s wild Top End region.

Jeff Burdick is a frequent contributor to the ASU Travel Guide.