Kakadu National Park

A hundred and fifty kilometres east of Darwin you reach the western boundary of KAKADU NATIONAL PARK, a unique area of largely unspoilt wilderness and, along with Uluru (Ayers Rock), the most visited natural site in Australia. 

On UNESCO's World Heritage List, it was brought to worldwide attention when used as a backdrop in the film Crocodile Dundee. The park derives its name from the Gagudju language group of Aborigines, who number among the area's traditional custodians; the Gagudju Association now manages the park, with the assistance of the Australian National Conservation Agency. The association also claims a royalty from the uranium mined in Kakadu: along the eastern border with Arnhemland lies fifteen percent of the world's known reserves, and the Ranger Uranium Mine near Jabiru yields around $10 million a year for the association. Indeed, the environmental debate over the proposed mining in the late 1970s was instrumental in the establishment of the park.

The park's 20,000 square kilometres encompass the entire catchment area of the South Alligator River, misnamed by an early British explorer after the river's prolific crocodile population. In its short run to the sea, the river passes through, and creates, a number of varied topographical features. Ravines in the southern sandstone escarpment, itself topped with plateau heathlands, shelter scattered pockets of monsoonal rainforest, while downstream the more commonly seen eucalypt woodlands merge into the paperbark swamps and tidal wetlands of the coastal fringe.

Within these varied habitats an extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna thrives. Included are 1300 different plants, over 10,000 species of insect, half The Territory's species of frog, a quarter of Australia's freshwater fish and over 120 different reptiles - some, such as the freshwater (or Johnston) crocodile, unique to the Top End. A third of Australia's birds can also be found in Kakadu, including the elegant Jabiru stork, the similarly large brolga, with its curious courting dance, lily-hopping jacanas, white-breasted sea eagles, which build lifelong nests from heavy sticks, as well as galahs and magpie geese by the thousand. Mammals include kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, 26 bat species, and dingoes.

With so many interdependent ecosystems, maintaining the park's natural balance has become a full-time job. The water buffalo, brought in from Timor early in the last century and one of ten feral species found in the park, proliferated so successfully that its wallowing behaviour soon turned the fragile wetlands into saltwater mudbaths. However, concerted bovine eradication in the Top End has left other problems in its wake, not least the aptly named salvinia molesta weed. With no buffaloes to eat it, the exotic weed has invaded vast areas of the wetlands, creating a thick, sunlight- and oxygen-depleting mat that chokes all other plant and fish life.

The other ever-present danger is fire. Burning off has long been recognized as a technique of land management by Aborigines who lit small, controllable fires as an aid to hunting and to stimulate new plant growth. Today, rangers imitate age-old Aboriginal practice, burning off the drying speargrass during June to preclude bushfires at the end of the Dry, when the desiccated countryside could be devastated by an early electrical storm. Finally, the disastrous effect that Queensland's poison-army of cane toads might have on Kakadu's precious ecology doesn't even bear thinking about.

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