Kakadu National Park

Listen for a moment. Out here the air is thick and warm, and it carries the smell of dry grass and wet mud at the same time. Somewhere a kookaburra laughs. Far off, a sandstone cliff glows orange as the light moves across it. Under your feet the red earth is fine as powder, and it will stay on your shoes long after you leave.

Welcome to Kakadu National Park, in the tropical north of Australia's Northern Territory. It covers roughly twenty thousand square kilometres, which makes it the largest national park in the country. That is a hard number to picture. Think of it this way — you could drive for hours inside the park and still not reach the other side. Rivers, floodplains, woodland, monsoon forest and stone country all fit within its borders.

Kakadu is not only a landscape. It is a home. Aboriginal people have lived here for tens of thousands of years, and their descendants still live here today. The traditional owners are known as Bininj in the north of the park and Mungguy in the south. Since the late 1970s, the park has been jointly managed by these traditional owners and the Australian government. So the land you are standing on is not a wilderness empty of people. It is country with owners, laws and stories.

UNESCO first listed Kakadu as a World Heritage Site in 1981, and the listing was later extended. It is one of only a small number of places in the world recognised for both natural and cultural value. That double recognition matters. It says that the rocks, the rivers and the people belong to one story, not two separate ones. The park's name comes from Gagudju, one of the languages once spoken in the northern part of this region.

Here is the first surprise. Kakadu does not have four seasons. The Bininj calendar describes six. Each one is marked by changes in weather, plants and animals. There is a season of heavy monsoon rain, a season when the grass bends flat under storms, a cool and misty time, and a season of building heat, when everyone waits for the first rains. Local people read the land through these signals... the flowering of a tree, the call of a bird, the smell of smoke.

Water shapes everything here. In the wet months, rivers spill over their banks and the floodplains become shallow inland seas. Roads close. Waterfalls thunder off the escarpment. In the dry months, the water pulls back into billabongs — still pools left behind by the retreating floods. Animals crowd around them. A boat trip on a billabong like Yellow Water at first light shows you just how many creatures depend on this cycle.

And yes, the animals deserve your respect. Saltwater crocodiles live in the rivers, the billabongs and sometimes in places that look perfectly calm. They are large, patient and very fast. Follow every warning sign and never swim unless a site is clearly marked as safe. Alongside them live water buffalo, wallabies, goannas, frill-necked lizards and fish of many kinds. Kakadu is also home to around a third of all the bird species found in Australia. Bring binoculars, and you will understand why birdwatchers travel here from across the world.

Now lift your eyes to the stone. The Arnhem Land escarpment runs along the eastern side of the park as a long wall of sandstone cliffs. This rock is very old and has been worn by wind and water over enormous spans of time. Its overhangs and shelters gave people protection from rain and sun. And on those sheltered surfaces, people painted.

Kakadu holds one of the largest concentrations of rock art anywhere on Earth. Some paintings are thought to be many thousands of years old, while others were added within living memory. At Ubirr, in the north of the park, you can see images of fish, turtles and wallabies drawn in a style known as X-ray art. In this style, the artist shows the inside of the animal — the backbone, the organs, the parts that matter for food. It is a way of teaching as much as a way of decorating.

Here is the second surprise. Among the paintings at Ubirr is a striped animal that many experts identify as a thylacine, sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger. That animal vanished from mainland Australia thousands of years ago. So when you look at that image, you are looking at a record made by someone who saw it alive. Very few places let you stand that close to such deep time. Just outside the park's boundary, archaeologists have found evidence that people were living in this region far earlier than once believed — tens of thousands of years ago.

In the south, at Burrungkuy, also known as Nourlangie, a rock shelter holds paintings of ancestral beings. One of them is Namarrgon, the Lightning Man. According to Bininj stories, he carries stone axes on his head, elbows and knees, and he strikes the clouds to make thunder and lightning. These are not legends in the casual sense. For traditional owners, these beings are part of living law. Some places in the park are restricted or sacred, and visitors are asked not to enter them or photograph them.

Kakadu also carries a modern tension. Inside the park sits a separate area that was once home to the Ranger uranium mine. Mining there has now ended, and work continues to restore the land. The story of that mine, and of the long struggle by the Mirarr traditional owners over another nearby deposit, is part of how Kakadu came to look the way it does today. It shows that this place has been argued over, defended and cared for.

When you explore, take it slowly. Start early, when the light is soft and the animals are active. Walk up to a lookout like the one at Ubirr in the late afternoon, and watch the floodplain turn gold, then pink, as the sun goes down. Carry plenty of water, wear a hat, and expect the heat to be stronger than you think. Visit the cultural centre near Cooinda or the Bowali visitor centre to hear the land described in the voices of its owners.

So, before you move on, stand still for one more breath. Look at the stone, the grass, the far line of the escarpment. Notice the insects humming and the heat rising off the ground. People have watched this same horizon for longer than almost anywhere else on the planet. As you walk away, look down at the red dust on your shoes. You are carrying a little piece of very old country with you.