Month: July 2021

Part 1: Traveller Torture

When we arrived in Katherine after two nights in Kakadu, all the Woolworths assistants were wearing masks, a large crowd was shopping at 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and the  bread had completely sold out. We had been mostly without coverage in Kakadu and our phones now flashed us notifications that explained people’s strange behaviour. Darwin had gone into lockdown two hours before our arrival in Katherine, and the premier of South Australia, in a fit of premature panic, had sealed his state from all aliens, or rather, other Australians. The West Australian Premier had sealed his border too.

I am not against carefully restricting the movements of people who have been in a hotspot, but locking everyone out of half of Australia because of one case in a remote mine? If only Australian governments could be more measured in their reactions, more rational in weighing up all the risks involved, more systematic in buying a range of vaccines, and more competent in rolling them out. 

“We have nowhere to go,” was a common refrain in the Katherine Holiday Park. I felt for our fellow travellers. Some had booked and paid for accommodation, flights and cruises in the Kimberley; they discovered now that their mere presence in the Northern Territory—not even in a hotspot—would oblige them to quarantine for 14 days at their own expense if they crossed into Western Australia.

“We could just drive around in circles,” I said to Davey.

“There are no circles in the Northern Territory,” he replied. “There are just roads that take you from north to south or east to west.”

He spends too much time looking at maps, but it can be useful.

For once our lack of planning proved to be a blessing. We had tried to book a site in Alice Springs* but it was lucky that we had failed, since South Australia was no longer a possible way home. The north to south road was out.

So we filled in our Queensland Travel Declaration, downloaded it while we still had mobile coverage, and headed south towards Three Ways to take the road east.

* A Queenslander at Camooweal commented that he expected Alice Springs to go into lockdown, since the mine workers flew in and out of that airport. His words were prescient: the very next day, June 30, Alice Springs also went into a precautionary lockdown. 

Part 2: Kakadu

We found Kakadu quite difficult to navigate, perhaps not surprisingly, given its size. Whereas there were simple online fact sheets for both Keep and Litchfield, which provided precise details about all the best short walks in one straightforward file, Kakadu’s documentation was fragmentary and confusing. There were PDFs about some walks, yet without information about the walk’s location in the park and how to get to the starting point. It seemed as though there was no clear overarching plan aimed at making the features of the park as easily accessible as possible.

It looked as though much of the park infrastructure had been set up in the 1980s and then allowed to disintegrate slowly and inexorably. The signage on some of the walks and the tracks themselves clearly needed upgrading, especially when compared to the beautifully maintained signage and tracks at Litchfield.

Kakadu is administered by the federal government, and it shows.

Yet there is so much that is not to be missed at Kakadu, such as the rock art sites at Ubirr and Burrungkuy (Nourlangie). At Ubirr we had the feeling, as we had at Nigli Gap in Keep, that we were encountering a world from days long gone, a place where people had lived vibrant, mysterious and unimaginable lives far removed from ours.

Mandy Muir of the Murrumbur clan was our tour guide during our cruise on Yellow Waters. She is an Indigenous woman who has family connections in both  Kakadu and the Kimberley and who has worked on the wetlands for over 30 years. It was an utter delight to be in her company. She told us of her youth in this magical “backyard” and revealed the depth of her knowledge at every twist and turn of her amazingly manoeuvrable boat.

Mandy could name every kind of bird on the waters, tell us where and how old their nests were, identify the trees where their young were about to spread their wings, and point out hidden inlets where crocodiles were hunting barramundi in plain sight. At one point, as a crocodile was closing in on its prey, the barramundi in danger from those mighty jaws leapt over the scaly body and fled into open water. It seemed that our tour guide knew exactly where to take us so that we could watch the wetland creatures and appreciate their idiosyncrasies.

As we drove through the waters teeming with bird life, Mandy drew in close to the banks so that we could snap shots of the fat crocodiles lying along the muddy edges. She also provided insights into the difficulties of administering the park and touched on the problems caused by feral animals such as buffaloes. Her warmth, humour and generosity were as memorable as the wetlands themselves.

Final Notes and Comments
Accommodation

• Jabiru Crocodile Hotel (classy and genuinely luxurious)
• Djarradjin (Muirella Park) (a lovely spot—but we ate inside our tent to avoid the mosquitoes)
• Katherine Holiday Park (they clean the kitchens here!—always chockablock, but professionally run)
• Banka Banka Station (the COVID crisis put paid to the evening damper, but we loved this spot—our last night in the NT)

A List of the Birds We Saw on Yellow Waters: 

Jabirus, egrets, brolgas, snake-necked darters, brolgas, spoonbills, magpie geese, plumed whistling ducks, white-bellied sea eagles… There were others but I didn’t catch all their names!

A Pertinent Quotation from the Ever-Quotable Katherine Murphy:

The default in Australia throughout this pandemic has been risk aversion. (The Guardian, 30-6-2021)