Groote Eylandt: the island where they keep crocs as pets

On an island in the remote far reaches of the Northern Territory is a journey not only through a remarkably wild and dangerous natural world, but through thousands of years of human history. Welcome to Groote Eylandt.

outback northern territory lodge stays accommodation history aborigines art culture

Dusk lends a delicate light
to Groote Eylandt Lodge (photo: Sean Fennessy).

“I reckon someone might’ve gone through the fibre optics cable on their tractor." It serves me right, I suppose, for asking the big, bearded bloke pulling beers behind the bar why I can’t get emails on my iPhone.

The men all round him – knocking back ice-cold stubbies after a long day trolling for game fish – hardly look the Facebook type.

Tall tales aren’t for mates a thousand kilometres away; they’re for the blokes beside you. The ones that slap your back and scream advice as you pull the big one in. The type who’ll back up your bullshit stories, because they’ll sure as hell want you to back up theirs.

“The same thing happened last year." Oh, the bartender’s actually serious: someone really did run over the internet on their tractor. “All of East Arnhem Land lost their signal for a week."

The sun’s setting outside, a splurge of orange and red so profound someone should be selling tickets; though nobody, of course, can post a single shot.

Out in the mangroves and beside the rough sand beaches that skirt the Gulf of Carpentaria – just beyond the safety of my spot here on the deck of Groote Eylandt Lodge – the encroaching dark is full of creatures that would love to drag me down under all that blood-warm ocean.

There’s always been something about being in the Territory that makes me feel like I’m teetering on the edge of an abyss: that if I take one wrong step, it’s curtains for me.

To anyone who reckons it takes a safari in Africa to experience ultimate adventure in the wild, I’d counter: where else on the planet but the Northern Territory can you consider yourself an extreme traveller just sitting outside your room having a cup of tea in the morning?

Stay on the sand among the mangroves at the remote Groote Eylandt Lodge (photo: Sean Fennessy).

I’ll be spending a week here, far from the bright lights of the capital, Darwin. Where I’m going – the largely unheralded Groote Eylandt, and the largely unreachable East Arnhem Land – few tourists ever venture, and so life goes on as it always has, and probably always will.

On Groote Eylandt, they keep saltwater crocs for pets. And why not?

The Territory’s the only place in the world where you’re allowed to; and dogs and cats have a habit of disappearing round these parts. Head ranger Adrian Hogg is cradling his pet crocodile in his arms like a newborn baby.

“They make great pets," he says, stroking its snout just above the teeth. “But they’re not for everybody. Just watch them, even when they’re little buggers, they bite and spin. They can strip your finger in a second flat."

All but 30 tourists a year who come to Groote Eylandt come to fish, this being one of the world’s premier game fishing destinations.

But the island’s newly appointed tourism co-ordinator, Nick Darby, is adamant there’s much more to do.

The roads on Groote Eylandt that don’t lead to the mine (Groote Eylandt produces a quarter of the world’s manganese) are all fiercely corrugated red dirt trails.

But they lead to places Nick’s only just discovering, often just days before I do (and where else on Earth does that happen?) He’s excited today; he’s taking me to an Aboriginal community on the other side of the island that he’s only just received permission to bring travellers to; I’ll be the very first guest there.

Groote Eylandt may well teem with waterfalls and many-millennia-old cave paintings, but Nick’s only just finding them.

Here at Umbakumba Aboriginal community, a tiny outback village sits beside a sea the exact same shade of blue as the sky; it’s so clear that I watch queen fish jump, and tiny slivers of bait fish chased by God-knows-what. An eagle ray leaps clean out of the water as I sit cross-legged on a tiny concrete jetty savouring my morning tea.

“There’s a croc that likes to sit out there on the reef line," Nick says, a reminder, if I needed one, that the Territory is no place for ocean swimmers.

We bash back across the red dusty trail and cool down in the shade of stringy barks.

I paddle in the clear, chilled waters of Leske Pools, watching blue-winged kingfishers flit from tree to tree. There could be death adders in the red sand beside me, but at least I’m safe for now from saltwater crocs.

Just around the corner, Nick surprises me with a picnic he’s set up on a sand bar in a billabong. I sit in a plastic chair nibbling cheese and sipping wine as a goanna shoves a yabby that it has fished from the water slowly down its throat.

There are Aboriginal cave paintings around these parts – plenty of them.

Nick reckons maybe only 50 outsiders have ever seen the ones he’s taking me to. They’re reached via a winding trail through black snake country, which takes me high above the gum trees below.

And there are many more sites yet on Groote Eylandt that will “blow my mind", but I can’t see them just yet. “No white man’s ever seen some of them," he says – rock chasms, secret canyons, green waterholes. No one sees anything around here without permission from the locals.

Back at the lodge, I walk next door to the Anindilyakwa Art Gallery where resident artist Alfred Lalara shows me a dash painting he’s just finished. When I ask its meaning, he looks shyly at a woman perusing the artwork across the room. “Not with her here," he says, so softly that I can barely hear him.

Others sure don’t mind telling me stories on Groote Eylandt. Like the one I’ll hear most nights about the prawn trawler captain who fought the mackerel boat mob; then when he rowed his tender off to lick his wounds, he capsized and no one ever found his body. When we drive past Groote Eylandt’s nine-hole golf course, Nick points at the second hole green.

“See that," he says, pointing at players ready to putt. “They don’t know there’s a big croc sitting below them looking up at them." The town here’s not much more than a rough grid of red soil and strangely resilient green grass that constitutes a footy field. There are mango trees and a row of fragrant frangipani, about all that separates suburbia from the cruelty of the outback.

In the evenings, I listen to the fishing mob warm up their tales, but when the light fades out entirely, I prefer the silence out here under the starriest skies I’ve seen. Beaming planets shine down at me, tiny stars glint and blinking stars shoot across the entire sky so slowly I can look away and still catch them. I fight the urge to watch it all lying on my back on the beach beside me.

I spend two more days on Groote Eylandt, but I long to go further into the Territory, beyond where any commercial airline can take me. In the Top End, if you really want to go bush, you’re going to need your own plane. And in the Territory, no plane’s more capable of getting you there than a Cessna 210.

“It’s the workhorse of the Territory," my pilot says, rubbing his hand affectionately across the wing of the Cessna flying us to Davidson’s Arnhemland Safaris’ lodge from Darwin.

The camp at Davidson’s Arnhem Land Safaris, NT

The lodge is built within a land belonging exclusively to the local Indigenous people, set on 700 square kilometres of sacred land exclusively leased from the Amurdak people of East Arnhem Land.

East Arnhem Land is home to some the oldest peoples on Earth. And this morning, they got even older.

The paper I’m reading says anthropologists have discovered that Aboriginal people have lived in East Arnhem Land for 18,000 years more than the 47,000 they’d previously estimated: 65,000 years of continuous occupation. Imagine.

As we lift into the sky, keeping low over a landscape of red-brown sandstone escarpments, broken only by skinny, snaking rivers that flood come the wet season, making all I’ll be seeing totally unreachable, I try to comprehend thousands of generations of humans eking out a life down there below me.

Davidson's Arnhem Land Safaris, Northern Territory

The private landing strip at Davidson’s (photo: Sean Fennessey).

Airports in East Arnhem Land come without security screening or cafes. They’re no more than a bumpy red track cut between gum trees and barely wide enough for a plane to land on.

We’re met by a bloke in a dusty LandCruiser, and driven just around the corner to the lodge.

Davidson’s Arnhemland Safaris’ eco-lodge is as luxurious as it gets this far east of Darwin, though luxury in the Territory comes without Jacuzzis or gold-plated bathroom vanities: five-star round here is about exclusivity, and at Davidson’s there’s no one around you for 200 kilometres in any direction.

Safari Mount Borradaile, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

Safari vehicle Mount Borradaile, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

Locals have another measure for luxury in these parts too, it’s how cold your beer is. The further into the Top End you go, the harder it is to keep your beer cold.

The diesel they need to run the generator that keeps your drink chilled at Davidson’s has to come from Darwin, five or so hours’ drive down a dirt track through the bush. In the Wet, no truck’s got a hope in hell of making it through.

Davidson's Arnhem Land Safari, Northern Territory

Ranger Luke Troup surrounded by thousands of years of rock art (photo: Sean Fennessy).

Ranger Luke Troup sits me down at the bar, before I leave the relative safety of our compound. “If you walk off into the bush around here you tend to perish," he says slowly. “And don’t get too complacent, salties [saltwater crocs] will walk long distances across floodplains, mostly at night, so don’t think fresh water in the Territory is safe."

We traverse tracks among monsoonal rainforest and past paperbark swamps in the back of an old modified LandCruiser (no one trusts anything but a LandCruiser in the Territory) until we reach sandstone escarpment country. Here valleys, overhangs and caves have been occupied by the Amurdak people for tens of thousands of years.

We climb a trail beneath a towering escarpment, until we reach an overhang on the cliff face. We squeeze through a tight gap while above us, an enormous serpent is painted at face level.

Rock art Mount Borradaile, Davidson's Arnhem Land Safaris

Forms from beyond time forever marked in stone (photo: Sean Fennessy).

“This one they reckon goes back 20,000 years," Luke says casually. “I’ve had people from all over the world studying rock art and they reckon the rock art here’s better than anywhere. Lots of paintings round here, no anthropologist has ever seen. The Amurdak people don’t want them to. We only find out what they want to tell you, and, mate, they don’t tell you much."

Among the flowering grevillea in the cracks between the rocks, where 100-year-old kentia palms manage to make the outback look tropical, there’s an energy flowing right out of the earth. You don’t have to be cosmic to sense it either, you just have to open your eyes: all around me white, ochre, yellow and red rock drawings depict the last 50,000 years of human habitation on this planet.

Later, when I’ve let the heat drain from a Top End afternoon in the bar (bonding with local characters like veteran tour guide Seb Lord, who tells me he “won’t touch vegans" when he’s booking clientele), we take a slow boat ride up a creek lined by paperbarks, into a billabong dwarfed by towering escarpments.

Mount Borradaile, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

Cooper Creek at Mount Borradaile

Cormorants and brahminy kites circle the heavens above, staying clear of the thousands of magpie geese who scramble off towards the sunset (40,000 gather here each September). Saltwater crocs lurk in the shallows, only their prehistoric heads show above the surface, set in permanent sneers, their rows of incisors warning enough for any creature to keep its distance.

For the next three days I explore this place day and night; I’ll hit a five-metre croc in a five-metre runabout in the shallows of a narrow creek entrance, riding the wash as it thrashes about in protest. I’ll tiptoe through caves full of ancient bones, all that’s left of the people who once lived here (“they’ll be here till they break down to dust and go back to the earth," my guide tells me).

Saltwater crocodile, Mount Borradaile, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

Saltwater Croc at Mount Borradaile, Arnhem Land

And in the quieter moments – afloat on a billabong with Champagne in hand as the colours of the sunset lend a delicacy to this place that makes me forget momentarily that I’m surrounded by crocs twice as long as me – I realise that there’s no limit to adventure in the Territory.

If we view human existence in Australia as a single day, non-Indigenous people’s time in Australia makes up a matter of minutes, whereas Indigenous people have been here since the crack of dawn. A visit to the Territory isn’t about where you go, it’s about the passage back through time you take – thousands and thousands of years – to the people who lived and died here so many times over, and the memory of them that lingers.

Groote Eylandt and Davidson’s Arnhem Land Safari’s details

Getting there: Qantas, Virgin and Jetstar fly to Darwin from Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Airnorth fly to Groote Eylandt from Darwin.

Staying there: Stay at Groote Eylandt Lodge which can arrange all your tours, including cultural tours and fishing charters.

All meals and tours are included at Davidson’s ArnhemLand Lodge. The lodge can also organise air transfers.

For more information on Groote Eylandt, visit the Groote Eylandt section of the official Northern Territory website at northernterritory.com

From Country to coast, Arnhem Land offers an invitation to connect with the spirit of an ancient landscape.

I’ve been told more than once, by people who know a lot more about it than me, that if you just listen, Country will speak to you. Floating on this large tinnie with the engine cut on a ‘side street’ of the Arafura Swamp near Murwangi, I can finally hear it – even if I don’t yet understand the language.

It’s too hot for cicadas, but the waterbirds of Arafura are providing the soundtrack to this experience. The mad cackle of blue-winged kookaburras. The high-pitched calls of plumed whistling ducks. The majestic cries of various kite species as they circle overhead.

And the resonant honks of magpie geese, totems of the local Ganalbingu People and allegedly very good walle (eating), although you’ll need to go through the correct ceremonies to find out. All the while, wind has become a telephone to the elements, rustling through the gum trees and Arafura palms.

There aren’t many crocodiles right now – recent flooding has made their territory a whole lot larger than the usual 700 square kilometres of freshwater ecosystem they have to wallow around in. But they’re still here to join in the cacophony of life.

Murwangi guide, Graham Gunurri. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

In fact, our first crocodile makes itself known just as our guides – Ganalbingu man, Graham Gunurri and adopted Indigenous man, Lachlin Dean – stop at a significant landmark that relates to a local songline. We only get the topline version – the rest is only shared during ceremony – but what is clear is that a crocodile spirit was trapped under the water below us for stealing fire during the Dreamtime. No sooner has this been shared than the thrash of a tail and the whip of a pointed, scaly nose indicates that a free-roaming crocodile just caught itself a juicy fish for lunch.

Arnhem Land with Outback Spirit

Enjoy a cruise of Arafura Swamp. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

This is only day four of Outback Spirit’s 13-day Arnhem Land Wetlands & Wildlife wilderness adventure from Cairns to Darwin. Starting with a flight from Cairns, in Tropical North Queensland, into the Northern Territory’s Gove Peninsula, spending the first few days exploring Nhulunbuy and Yirrkala.

Before we’d even touched down, it was immediately clear that Arnhem Land stands apart from the rest of Australia. Looking out my window, I was struck by how untamed the landscape is. In most parts of this country, you only get glimpses of this sort of ‘wild’ before farmland or buildings tear it apart. But not here.

Nhulunbuy is known for its beautiful beaches. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

“Just wait until you see the golden dirt,” my seatmate, Lisa, leaned over to tell me. “It’s so red.” Lisa is a local, returning from a quick trip to Sydney – a very long way for a doctor’s appointment. But she was relieved to be returning home. “I just want a peaceful life. It’s a peaceful life here,” she shared.

Outside my window, the dense, dark-green blanket spread out over the land continued untouched until we flew a little lower, when that red dirt Lisa prepared me for breaks through. In the last of the day’s light, the winding roads glow like the veins and arteries of the Earth.

“This has to be the most beautiful airport I’ve ever seen,” I exclaimed. Lisa just smiled, satisfied.

Welcome to Gove Peninsula

A member of the Galpu clan in East Arnhem Land. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

The next day, our group of 15 heads out to Wirrwawuy Beach where we receive a Welcome to Country by the Traditional Custodians of the land, the Galpu clan of the Miwatj (north-east Arnhem Land), part of Yolŋu Country. The joy we are privy to is infectious. Following the lead vocals of Lita Lita Gurruwiwi (born performer and, I suspect from his endless jokes, larrikin), we trace the songline of a spiritual man searching the land for food and water. It’s a family affair. Clan leaders play clapping sticks and yidaki (the Yolŋu word for didgeridoo). Three-year-old children pay close attention to the hands, feet and cries of the adults around them. They join in for the promise of a lolly and then abandon the show in favour of their own games.

A soft breeze rustles the leaves of the tamarind trees we sit under, bringing with it the gentle scent of ocean, just metres away from our shady patch. Excitement ripples through our group and the performers alike when a dolphin and her baby are spotted playing in small waves, connecting us further to the natural world around us. This is about sharing.

To close the Welcome to Country, jilka leaves are used to create a cleansing smoke. This same smoke is used to cleanse the belongings of the deceased, and then the loved ones of their grief. It’s also used to help connect new generations to Country. Today, it is used to make us safe on our travels through Arnhem Land.

Spotting wildlife at Arafura Swamp

an aerial view of Murwangi Lodge, Arnhem Land

Murwangi Lodge is exclusive to guests of Outback Spirit. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

It’s a safety I’ll be especially thankful for on day four, sleeping at Outback Spirit’s exclusive Murwangi Safari Camp on the banks of the Arafura Swamp. While earlier in the day I heard Country, the message it’s sharing becomes loud and clear in the night.

While curled up in my comfortable safari tent – reading a book by lamplight with the zips tightly closed against the mosquito population – the nightly soundtrack of cicadas and birdcalls is suddenly, and violently, split in two.

A large splash, a low, primordial growl, one desperate squawk and then silence. The most eerie silence I’ve ever heard. The birds, geckos and cicadas don’t start up again for a good five minutes. I’ll never know for sure, but I feel confident the world stopped to honour the lost. I’ve seen a lot of crocodiles before, even in the wild. But something about this aural encounter feels more visceral than anything I’ve ever laid eyes on.

I’ve spent plenty of time on different lands around the world, but I’ve never witnessed the breathtaking busyness of such a remote one before. And this is only our second stop.

a waterbird in Arafura Swamp, Arnhem Land

Arafura Swamp is home to hundreds of species of waterbirds. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

Dropping a line at Maningrida

a luxe safari suite in Barramundi Lodge, Arnhem Land

Barramundi Lodge is in the remote reaches of Arnhem Land and features 12 luxe safari suites. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

The next day, we head to Barramundi Lodge, another safari-tented stop just outside the small community of Maningrida. Typically, we’d be driving for hours along red-dirt roads, but flooding as a result of record-breaking rain has rendered many of them closed. None of us complain as our 12-passenger aerial caravan flies us overhead instead. Showing off more of this beautiful country and keeping us oriented.

Sunsets at Barramundi Lodge are otherworldly. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

Here, swamp banks are swapped for the privacy of stringybark and woollybutt gum trees that surround each tent. The main dining cabin boasts sweeping views of the plain below, transformed each evening under the vibrant oranges and reds of sunset.

The name is no mistake. Every year, Barramundi Lodge attracts guests hoping to catch themselves a juicy barra. A metre-long club plaque hangs proudly near the kitchen. And, while some members of our group do have luck with their fishing rods out on the nearby Liverpool and Tomkinson rivers, it’s again the wildlife that captures my attention.

a saltwater crocodile in Liverpool River

A large saltie near the mouth of Liverpool River. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

Mud skippers turning muddy mangrove banks of the mid-tide to silver as they scuttle around. Egrets stretching their long legs as they wade along the edges of the water. A white-bellied sea eagle circling overhead. And of course, crocodiles. Dozens lining the banks, soaking up the morning sun, proving completely unbothered by our existence, while tiny waving crabs dance all around them. Pandanus and towering paperbark trees indicate where the salty mangrove water stops and freshwater begins.

Keeping culture going

Admire the artwork of local Aboriginal people. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

With all fishermen satisfied, we head back to shore and over to Maningrida Arts & Culture centre – the oldest and largest of its kind in the Northern Territory, with all profits going back to the artists – and the Djómi Museum.

Doreen Jinggarrabarra is our guide to both, a leading fibre artist whose work has been shown in galleries around the world. Doreen shares with us the basics of her art form, weaving pandanus leaves into magic before our eyes. Although a full dilly bag would take two to three weeks to complete, the large installations she exhibits take even longer.

an Aboriginal artist weaving a dilly bag in Barramundi Lodge

Artist Doreen Jinggarrabarra weaving a dilly bag. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

Despite her huge success as an artist, it’s not until Doreen has finished walking us around Djómi that she allows a modest sense of pride to enter her tone. But it’s not for herself.

“We don’t forget our culture,” she tells us. “We teach our kids. We keep it going.”

And that’s what the museum is about. Keeping it going, even outside the community. Doreen walks us around artefacts and artworks, meticulously explaining the materials and use of each one. Or, at least, those of the Eastern clans to which she belongs. For the items collected from further away, Doreen sits down. They’re not her stories to tell.

The intricate details of a dilly bag. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

We learned back at Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka Centre in Gove Peninsula that this is essential to local culture. Songlines are held within every artwork and every artefact. The Yolŋu don’t deal in numbers, we were told. But it’s safe to say that tens of thousands of years of knowledge and history are written into these artworks. Sharing a songline that doesn’t belong to you is a huge offence, the traditional punishment being death.

Exploring the rock art of Mt Borradaile

lily pads by the creek near Mt Borradaile

A lily-clad billabong near Mt Borradaile. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

It’s an education we take with us into our next stop, Mt Borradaile, famed for being home to the largest outdoor rock art gallery in the world, some of which dates back as far as 55,000 years. It’s impossible to count the number of artworks across the 700-square-kilometre area where the remote safari lodge is nestled against the Arnhem Land escarpment.

Escarpment country is different again. Gum trees still abound and water isn’t far away, but we find ourselves in the middle of dusty, rocky land. Deep red and brown tones take over here.

Mt Borradaile has the world’s largest single collection of rock art. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

A buffalo hunter turned environmentalist who opened eco lodge Davidson’s Arnhemland Safaris here, Max Davidson was granted permission to use the land by the Amurdak People who own it, and his friend Charlie Mangulda in particular – the last man who can say he belongs to this Country. After stumbling on one of the largest known depictions of the Rainbow Serpent in Australia, they decided to share the art instead.

While modern artworks are more detailed, showing everything from mythical figures and local animals to guns and boats, it’s the oldest, simplest displays that really get under my skin. Grass strikings and handprints are believed to serve as the original mark on Country. I can’t help but wonder who that person was, with a handprint so like mine, leaving signs of life tens of thousands of years ago.

Hundreds of birds fly above the ancient landscape. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

The afternoon is spent out on Coopers Creek. Once again, I’m struck by the beauty of Arnhem Land’s waterways. The way they teem with life, making them at once the busiest places I’ve ever seen, yet somehow also the calmest. Wild rice lines the banks, where hundreds of magpie geese fill the air with their honks. And then with their bodies as they occasionally take flight, creating a spotty blanket against the clear sky.

Nearby, a whistling kite swoops a dead fish floating in the water. He eventually gives up and flies away, possibly in embarrassment. Crocodiles tease us from along the lily pads lining the edge of the creek, dipping below the surface when our boat gets too close.

Meanwhile, the sculptured cliff faces of Mt Borradaile itself change colours as the sun moves lower in the sky. And our little tour group, in the middle of it all, is the only sign of human interference.

Ending in luxury at Seven Spirit Bay

the wilderness lodge at Seven Spirit Bay, Coral Bay.

The wilderness lodge overlooks Coral Bay. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

It’s almost a shock when we find ourselves at Seven Spirit Bay on the Cobourg Peninsula the next afternoon. While the earthy tones are not entirely gone, they are mixed with a white ochre and the vivid green of native plants recently treated to rainfall.

Our lodge sits above the pristine sands and calm waters of the bay, cruelly enticing guests to dive right in even while crocodiles and sharks make that impossible. Like one of our guides will later say: “I don’t like going in the crocodile’s bathtub.”

Crossing the Arafura Sea at the top of Australia, we explore Victoria Settlement, the third, ill-fated attempt at British settlement in these parts and the motivation for many in my group to join this tour in the first place. Remnants of buildings and graves remain crumbling as plants slowly reclaim their territory.

the structure remains of Victoria Settlement

The crumbling remains of Victoria Settlement. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

We head back onto the water the next day to fish. The unsheltered water is rough enough to have us bouncing like we’re on a roller coaster. Wide, open ocean is replaced by striking, corrugated cliffs, eroded over the years by rainfall and leaving trees desperately clinging to red and white ochre with their exposed roots. We find a place to drop a line in.

Upon return to the lodge, we notice lemon sharks circling the pier, hoping to feast on the remains of our freshly caught fish as it’s prepared for tonight’s dinner. This last stop of our Arnhem Land journey feels like another world entirely. One where the gentle lapping of the ocean lulls us to sleep each night, and elevated accommodation offers more space than we’ve had in two weeks.

an aerial view of Seven Spirit Bay in Garig GunakBarlu National Park

Seven Spirit Bay is set amid the marine sanctuary of Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. (Image: Jess Miocevich)

Our 13-day journey will end tomorrow with a sunset cruise along Darwin’s famous Mindil Beach, but the emotion of leaving Arnhem Land hits me tonight. This isn’t a journey all Australians will take in their lifetime. But it is one that will never be forgotten by those who do.

A traveller’s checklist

Getting there

Fly direct to Cairns Airport from all major cities with Virgin, Jetstar and Qantas. Outback Spirit and Airnorth will take it from there.

Playing there

Outback Spirit is the only tour operator to take guests across the entire top of Arnhem Land (from east to west). Join the Arnhem Land Wetlands & Wildlife tour between May and September, from $11,795pp twin share. All accommodation, transportation, permits, food and drinks included.

termite mounds in Murwangi Safari Camp, Arnhem Land

Termite mounds reach for the sky. (Image: Jess Miocevich)