When we
eventually dragged ourselves away from Darwin, we headed straight to Kakadu.
Right past the Jumping Croc place we had gone to earlier in the week. It didn’t seem nearly so far when you take the 2-hour
detour out of the equation…
We stayed
at the Kakadu Lodge in Jabiru. We really wanted to free camp, but Bertha wouldn’t fit in the campground up in the northern
part, and the lodge had a pool and power, so we were happy with that.
I am in the
habit of collecting information when I see it. We visit nearly every Visitor
Information Centre and I have learnt that brochures on local attractions can be
‘sold out’ whilst those further away are plentiful. So I grab what I can when I
see it, and leave it in my ‘paperwork pile’ for when we eventually get there. So I felt
like I had a HEAP of information on Kakadu. And I did. There were brochures on
daily talks, brochures on weekly activities, brochures on drives and hikes and
more info than you could poke a stick at. But when I tired to figure out what
we should actually do, it all seemed rather worthless! Trying to consolidate the
information was incredibly complex and it took me 45 MINUTES to wrap my head
around our first day’s plans. In the end I had to run my
plans past the guy in the office and he was super impressed with what I came up
with. The entire time we were in Kakadu (which was 6 days all up) it was a
nightmare trying to get concrete information and in the end, people and word of
mouth was best by far.
So for our
first day, we started with some schoolwork and a slow start, knowing we had to
be at Cahills Crossing at 2pm for high tide.
This is the entry into Arnhem Land, and the tide covers the low bridge
for part of every day. The crocs have learnt that they can bask on the road, or
chase barramundi into the shallows and catch them and the people have leant
that this can be fun entertainment to watch! There were also a number of people
fishing and I was slightly concerned that one of them would be eaten by a croc
and I would have traumatised the children for life. Fortunately that didn’t happen and we got to eat our picnic lunch on
the viewing platform and play ‘spot the croc’.
From here we went to the Border store to
watch some local women preparing pandanas palm leaves for weaving. I was hoping
to see them weaving some dilly bags but they were actually just preparing their
materials. Its an incredibly tricky process and much to my utter disgust I
could not master it at all. To make matters FAR worse, Lexie could and took
great joy in doing it not once, or twice but three times perfectly. Little
show-off! The leaves have to be halved along their length, like peeling a giant
sticker. The concept is to fold the leaf, snap the fibres, pinch the surface
and peel it off. The reality is rather more difficult than that. Once it is
thin enough, the leaves are then divided into 3 to make them narrow and then
dried and eventually dyed in ashes or the water from yarrow that has been
cooked in a billy.
Only after
all of these processes can they begin the weaving parts. It’s very easy to understand why fibre artworks
are so expensive! We have actively resisted the urge to buy any, as I know we
would be tempted to use them as the vessel they are – bowls or baskets and kind
of devaluing them as an artwork. They are so much more than “just a bowl” and I know it would be tempting to treat them as such. So none for us.
After the
weaving demonstration, we headed to Ubirr to have a guided talk through the
rock art there. We took 2 hours to wander from site to site with Marcus and
hear the stories of the ancients and about cultural life in Arnhem Land. It was
the first time that Dunc and the children had heard a lot of this stuff, though
Dunc had had an induction for training in the Torres Strait Islands and most of
it was somewhat similar to the Tiwi Islands so it wasn’t new to me. It was VERY obvious that Marcus comes from an oral culture.
His stories waft on and on and their attention span is soooo much longer than
that of an active little 8yo boy! Being a traditional owner ranger meant that
Marcus could talk about whatever he wanted and both Dunc and I found the whole
2 hours truly fascinating!
We got to
see Rock Art that is so ancient it includes Tasmanian Tigers, which haven’t been on the mainland for 25 000 years! I was
intrigued with the depictions of white settlers and boats, but Angus loved all
the animals.
We ended up
at the most incredible cliff top to watch the sun set over the Kakadu wetlands.
It was simply breathtaking. We tried to go back another night to replicate the
experience, but there were so many fires that the haze was too solid for the
sunset. How fortunate we were to have this night!
Our second
day we wanted to see the Nourlangie Rock Art area. After racing back to the
caravan park the night before to catch the ranger talk on Rock Art, we had
learnt that we needed to be at Nourlangie early. In fact the same ranger,
Christian, was giving 3 different talks along the walking trail, and he was so interesting
that I really wanted to hear more of what he had to say.
Having been
‘trained’ by the aboriginal owners, he has a very controlled content that he can
discuss publicly. The children found him MUCH easier to understand and to
follow than Marcus, probably because they struggle with the aboriginal accents.
I loved hearing him talk about the anthropological aspects of the history of
the area. Christian gave 3 20-minute talks, but I could have listened to him
for hours longer. He also spoke more concretely about the artworks in front of
us, whereas Marcus told us the tales and stories about the artworks.
So we were
up early and all done with our hike by 11am. We stopped past the park vistor’s centre where I got even MORE information
(equally useless) and then headed into the town of Jabiru for a look around
before going back to the caravan park for a lazy afternoon by the pool. Angus
was keeping an eagle eye out for his friend Andrew from Robbie Robbins, but was
super excited to find his mate Riley parked right next to us. We were overjoyed
to catch up with Cam, Tonia, Jordyn and Riley again, for the first time since
Broome! Andrew arrived not long after and parked on the other side of Bertha,
resulting in Angus screaming “This is the BEST DAY EVER!!”
We had a couple
of chill out days enjoying the company and the pool before moving on to a
campground at the southern part of Kakadu – which I realized is as big as half
of Tasmania!!
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