Australasia > Australia > Northern Territories > Kakadu National Park > Bird watching > Articles > Kakadu v Litchfield: Australia's National Parks

Travelling in Australia’s Northern Territory you hear one refrain so often it verges on a chorus: Kaka-du, Kaka-don’t, retreating tourists chant, encouraging others to shun the World Heritage-listed national park. Invariably the chant is appended with a second line, in reference to nearby Litchfield National Park: Kaka-du, Kaka-don’t … Litchfield-do.

Whatever the rebuke, Kakadu remains a major tourist drawcard, as much by virtue of being famous for being famous. But the two most popular national parks of Australia’s Top End have become unwitting sparring partners, played one against the other for tourist favour. Kakadu receives about 240,000 visitors a year, while Litchfield, the Northern Territory’s fastest growing tourist destination, now draws in around 220,000 visitors.

But are the two national parks genuine rivals? Or are they fighting in different weight divisions? We put them to a three round test.

Scenery
Kakadu has a beauty that plays hard to get. Savanna woodland, characterised by tall eucalypts and long grasses, covers almost 80 percent of the park, making it indistinguishable from the rest of northern Australia. The Kakadu of the collective psyche, the lily-topped wetlands and the sheer escarpments, are confined to pockets, often with difficult access. Many people find this reality disappointing.

Kakadu’s moments of outright beauty are its four waterfalls, which can only be reached on unsealed roads, and then only one – Gunlom Falls – without a four-wheel drive. Jim Jim Falls, the most famous and spectacular, are a 60-kilometre, 4WD-only detour. To continue to Twin Falls requires sophisticated 4WD equipment. Jim Jim’s full force can only be appreciated in the wet season, a time when it is all but inaccessible. In the dry it slows to a trickle then stops. For those who make the trek this can be another disappointment.

The centrepiece of Litchfield is the Tabletop Range, from which tumble four permanent waterfalls. These are the park’s main visitor attraction. The gorges and valleys etched into the range are thick with tangly monsoon rainforest, even while the sandstone hillsides above are parched and sparsely vegetated. At the base of each falls is a cooling pool, normally a dangerous enticement in this part of the country, but Litchfield has that elusive Top End quality – swimming holes free of estuarine crocodiles.

Of the four falls – Wangi, Tolmer, Florence and Tjaynera – only Tolmer, a long tube of white water fed through a narrow crevice, is off-limits to swimmers (to protect ghost-bat colonies inside its caves). Wangi, Tolmer and Florence Falls are easily accessed on sealed roads, a big plus in the eyes of most short-term visitors. There are also the Buley Rockholes and little-visited Walker Creek where, even in a crowd, you can have a private camp-side pool. Very resorty.

On Points: In the beauty game, crown Litchfield Miss Top End.

Wildlife
Kakadu’s most famous wildlife image is the wildest one of all, the dinosaur that extinction forgot, the crocodile. But there are around 400 known types of birds, mammals and reptiles in the park and 399 of them are not man-eaters. Birds are Kakadu’s most visible inhabitants. The park is known to contain more than one-third of all the bird species in Australia, and its wetlands alone will sometimes support up to three million waterbirds.

Here, egrets stand poised like pointer dogs, jacanas tiptoe across lilies, kites swoop to steal meals out of other birds’ mouths, and jabirus, the icon of the Northern Territory, stand apart, solitary and aloof. But most noticeable are the magpie geese.

On a late dry-season dawn the sky above the Mamukala wetland is busier than Heathrow airspace with magpie geese arriving in echelon, honking like Sicilian drivers. More than 60 percent of the world’s magpie geese converge on Kakadu during the dry season. Mamukala, one piece of the South Alligator floodplain, is their favorite destination, where, by the end of the dry, the waters are shallow enough for them to dig at the bulbs of the spike-rush with their beaks.

At Yellow Water, Kakadu’s most popular spot, the birdwatching is made even simpler by the popular cruises that circle this permanently flooded adjunct of the South Alligator. Here, the birds are accustomed to the close approach of boats and the invasive sounds of outboard motors and camera shutters. Ninety minutes on Yellow Water is likely to reveal brolgas, jabirus, egret, night herons, Burdekin ducks, whistling ducks, kingfishers, magpie geese, jacanas and, yes, crocodiles. In fact, if you leave Kakadu without having seen a crocodile, then you probably haven’t looked hard enough.

Curiosities beget tourism and Litchfield’s compass-perfect termites are indeed curios. Magnetic termites build their tombstone-shaped mounds in perfect north-south alignment, angled to create constant heat on their eastern faces. These mounds can only be found on black-soil plains, like those beneath Litchfield’s centrepiece Tabletop Range.

More impressive still are the park’s cathedral termite mounds, veritable castles of termite construction. Made from saliva and excrement, and fluted like Doric columns, cathedral mounds can be up to six metres tall. As a relative comparison, the same human structure (hopefully made of materials other than saliva and excrement) would be over one kilometre high, more than twice the height of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. It makes the pyramids seem a quotidian achievement.

Goannas are a common sight in Litchfield, strutting across the grassy clearing at Wangi Falls like cowboys with chafing rash, or basking on the banks of the permanent streams. For birdlife, there’s the small Tabletop Swamp atop the range, but this is not the park for twitchers.

On Points: Birds v ants. Kakadu by the length of a jabiru’s neck.

Culture
Kakadu is one of only 20 World Heritage areas listed for both natural and cultural heritage, predominantly because of its rock art, which is among the finest in the world. There are around 5000 recorded art sites inside Kakadu, but only a handful have been popularised.

Ubirr and Nourlangie Rock, outliers of the Arnhem escarpment, are probably the most famous, and among the most prolific, art sites in Australia. Carbon dating shows that Aboriginal people have been occupying these shelters for more than 20,000 years. Images such as the rainbow serpent, Namarrgon the lightning man, and the Mimi spirits, who taught the people to paint, adorn the walls. There are x-ray paintings of the animals and fish caught by the indigenous people and there are examples of contact art, showing the first white men to arrive in the area, hands in pockets and pipes in mouths.

But Kakadu is no time capsule. Its enduring culture is arguably its most fascinating drawcard. The Aboriginal people of the area, the spiritual and legal owners of the park, have never left the area and continue to live traditional lives (with the modern aid of 4WDs and guns). Their enviable bond with the land, its creatures and seasons is celebrated at the Warradjan Cultural Centre at Yellow Water.

In Litchfield there is also evidence of thousands of years of Aboriginal existence, but what the casual visitor mostly sees is modern history, the sort of things other nations call yesterday. The rusting, corrugated-iron Blyth homestead, built in 1929 as an outstation to the Stapleton Station homestead, is the most popular cultural diversion. There are also remnants of tin, tantalite and copper mines dotted around the park.

On Points: Raise your tea cups to Kakadu.

Verdict
Maybe it’s a flaw of modern tourism that we demand instant gratification. We expect to step from our air-conditioned vehicles to be wowed in seconds and filled with the wisdom of scholars. Kakadu doesn’t do instant gratification. Litchfield does.

Kakadu is about subtleties. Park visitors are issued a two-week permit and it’s almost folly not to use it all to truly appreciate this vast park. More than almost any other Australian national park, Kakadu rewards the patient, whereas the pleasures of Litchfield wash quickly and magnificently over its visitors. Kaka-du, Kaka-do … Litchfield-too.

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