Kakadu National Park

Kakadu, in the Top End of Australia's Northern Territory, is the country's largest national park after one desert reserve: about 19,800 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales, running from tidal rivers on the coast to the sheer sandstone wall of the Arnhem Land escarpment. Most of the land belongs to its Aboriginal traditional owners, who manage it jointly with Parks Australia; their ancestors have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and archaeological sites in the region are among the oldest in Australia. UNESCO listed Kakadu in stages between 1981 and 1992 for both its natural and its cultural values.

The rock art is the heart of that cultural value. More than 5,000 art sites are recorded, painted over thousands of years in the rock shelters of the escarpment and its outliers, and they are among the finest bodies of Aboriginal rock art in Australia. Two sites, Ubirr in the north near the East Alligator River and Nourlangie further south, are among the most visited places in the park, with paintings of animals, people and ancestral beings along short walking trails.

The landscape changes completely with the seasons. The dry season, roughly May to September, brings clear skies and falling water; the build-up to the monsoon is hot and humid, with frequent lightning; the wet, from about January to March, floods the plains into vast wetlands and closes many roads. Waterfalls such as Jim Jim and Twin Falls plunge off the escarpment but are reached only by four-wheel drive and only in the dry season. Wildlife is abundant — the three Alligator Rivers were named in 1818 for their crocodiles, which the explorer took for alligators — and the park is home to about 30% of Australia's bird species. Wildlife cruises on Yellow Water billabong at Cooinda, or the Mamukala wetlands, are easy ways to see them.

The park is also scarred by and wrapped around an industrial site: the Ranger uranium mine, enclaved within Kakadu, ceased operations in January 2021, while feral water buffalo, pigs and invasive weeds remain management problems. The Bowali Visitor Centre near Jabiru, the park's only town, is the place to start and to check which roads and sites are open.

Getting there

Kakadu begins about 170 km east of Darwin, and Darwin International Airport (DRW) is the gateway. The sealed Arnhem Highway runs from Darwin to Jabiru, about 250 km by road, and the Kakadu Highway links the park south to Pine Creek and Katherine; both can be cut briefly by floods in the wet. Palmerston, near Darwin, is the nearest larger town.