In the Beginning... Kakadu and Arnhemland by Stanley Stewart

In the Northern Territories, hats have attitude. I had bought a fine Akuba in the best bush outfitters in Darwin, but no one was fooled. In these parts hats are not mere hats: they are biographies. Paul’s hat had been chewed by a crocodile. Tom’s hat had never been the same since the day his jeep caught fire. Brian’s hat had once carried a newborn baby; you could still see the stains. The trouble with my hat was that it simply hadn’t lived.

Brian and I were wading through a melaleuca swamp, trying not to tread on any crocodiles. We were on our way to an art gallery containing some of the world’s oldest paintings. Knee-deep in primeval ooze in the Australian outback made a pleasant change from Trafalgar Square and the crowds at the National Gallery. We passed water lilies in pools of sunlight and a guano lizard on a rock, still as sculpture.

“At the beginning of the world,” Brian said, taking a break from the subject of my hat, “there was marital discord.”

We climbed out of the soup of creation onto an island of sandstone, past upended boulders as big as tenements to a splendid natural penthouse, open to the winds. Sprawled across the ceiling was an ochre drawing of Umorrduk, the rainbow serpent who had created the rivers.

“See that hill out there,” Brian pointed over the heads of fig trees to distant rocks in the expanse of wetlands “That’s the first adulterer.”

We were in Dream-time in Arnhemland, a vast tract of wilderness in Australia’s Northern Territory and one of the last great strongholds of aboriginal culture. Arnhemland is like a separate nation with its own border controls and traditional laws. Visitors require a permit issued by the aboriginal councils. There are no roads, only tracks, no airports, only bush landing strips. Arnhemland is Australia before the white man arrived. It is also the repository of some of the greatest rock art sites on the continent. The paintings are stories and people have been sitting around in this penthouse spinning yarns for over 60,000 years.

“In the beginning,” Brian said, “Waramurungundi walked out of the sea onto the dry land and set about creating things. She created children and animals and the landscape. Her husband however was a bit of a layabout. While the wife was busy with creation, Wuragag was chasing after younger women. The rows were terrible. When Wuragag eventually stormed off into the sunset, Waramurungundi turned him to stone along with a couple of his girlfriends. They became those hills.” With his infectious smile, Brian made the beginning of the world sound like a story he had heard from his father-in-law over a couple of beers. Which is exactly what it was.

Brian was an aboriginal from the Bass Strait Islands near Tasmania at the other end of the continent. Twenty years ago as a young man he had gone walkabout and ended up in the Northern Territories where he had married Phyliss, a local girl. He liked the idea that his in-laws, the Gummulkbun clan, were spread across a quarter of a million acres of bush. He and his wife now run a small safari company for visitors to Arnhemland. People who look for art tours in the outback are an eclectic lot, a confusion of hats, a quirky mix of John Julius Norwich and Crocodile Dundee.

I had begun my journey in Darwin, a teeming metropolis to Brian, and a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere to the rest of us. Darwin sits on the Top End of Australia, linked to the rest of the continent by a single highway known as the Track. An 800-mile drive down the Track brings you to Alice Springs, which is still the middle of nowhere. You need to go another 800 miles before you get to anything resembling a city.

Despite its isolation and a redneck reputation, Darwin is a surprisingly cosmopolitan place. The choice of restaurants ranged from Indonesian to Middle Eastern. After dinner there were cultural riches: Romeo & Juliet at the Performing Arts Centre or crab races in the Jabiru bar. Romeo & Juliet fortunately was sold out. The next morning, slightly the worse for wear but with new insight into the thoroughbred crab, I purchased a splendid bushwhacker's hat and headed down the Track.

In these parts there is no shortage of space and much of the Northern Territory has been set aside for parks. The greatest of these is Kakadu, the largest park in Australia, which means very large indeed. Kakadu is about the size of Wales. It is has recently been listed as a World Heritage site, both for environmental and cultural reasons. Among a bewildering variety of different habitats - wetlands, flood plains, stone moors, monsoon forests, savannah woodlands, tidal flats - the park contains a wealth of ancient dreaming sites where the Aboriginal ancestors painted the world into existence in great rock art galleries like Nourlangie and Ubirr.

Kakadu is not so much a landscape as the ingredients for a landscape - grass, sky, clouds, rock escarpments, an excess of water - a geographical recipe still in its fluid state. The dramatic changes in the vegetation can make familiar places unrecognisable in the course of a week. The aboriginals count eight seasons here. Less acute observers would do well to remember two - the Wet and the Dry. By the end of the Dry vast tracts of Kakadu become a desert of cracked mud between shrunken billabongs. In the Wet there is water everywhere, as if the world was only just emerging from the Deluge.

It is Paradise for water birds. At the marshes of Fogg Levee it was standing room only. Glossy ibis, pied herons, royal spoonbills, plumed whistling-ducks, magpie geese, swamphens, three types of egrets and four types of cormorants rubbed feathers over a light fish lunch. There were delicate jacanas or Jesus birds whose habit of strolling across floating lilies make them look as if they were walking on water and the wonderful jabiru stork, with its long bill and its blank hangman’s eyes. Kites dive-bombed the cormorants stealing their catches while the pelicans hunted in packs, herding the fish into shrinking circles then gobbling them in unison.

I drove on through the wetlands where darter birds stood along the road with their wings outstretched trying to dry them in the wind, through savannah littered with ten-foot termite mounds, and through eucalyptus woodland where sulphur-crested cockatoos were quarrelling. In the late afternoon I went on a cruise on the Yellow River. The birds were meant to be the celebrities of this cruise, and they put in some star performances. A sea eagle with a two-metre wing span made a spectacular entrance, carrying off a three-foot fish, while a flock of whiskered terns banked behind a curtain of red lotus lilies. But they were upstaged by noises off, creatures we barely saw.

Like much of northern Australia, Kakadu is home to the big salties, the man-eating saltwater crocodiles that grow to over twenty feet. Crocodiles are alarmingly alert. Their sense of smell and vision is far superior to our own, and they register the slightest vibration in the water with a gland on the bottom of their jaw. Whenever you spot a crocodile you can be sure he’s already been watching you for some time.

Part of the mystique is that you rarely get to spot the whole thing. Crocodiles lurk. I spotted a pair of glinting eyes just above the surface, an ominous row of spikes, a powerful tail breaking the water. In the Northern Territories crocodiles are a great draw for tourists, and they like to maintain their reputation by eating one now and again. On the Yellow River cruise we were careful not to trail our hands in the water.

At dawn the next morning I helped a pilot push his Cessna out of the long grass on the edge of the airfield. We rose above glittering wetlands, over the long escarpment that marks the eastern boundary of the park, to Arnhemland. From the air it was reduced to its essentials, silver and black, water and dry land.

Brian was waiting for me at Mudjeegarrdart airstrip where a couple of wallabies loitered on the edge of the bush like unemployed baggage handlers. Brian looked me up and down.

“We gonna have to do something about that hat,” he said.

Brian’s camp, run by his two sidekicks, Paul and Tom, was a delightful spot on the edge of a billabong. Accommodation was in individual tents furnished like small cabins with beds, tables and hurricane lamps. The meals were taken in a screened mess tent, but the real heart of the camp was the cooking fire with its circle of camp chairs where people sat round in their hats shooting the breeze. In the afternoons, after a day looking at Art, I swam in the billabong beneath a waterfall watched by gangs of drunken parrots.

The Noisy Friar Birds and the Rainbow Lorrikeets spent their days at the alcoholic nectar in the wattle blossoms and by sundown they were pie-eyed and singing their hearts out. I spent a couple of days touring the magnificent art sites. The galleries are large rock outcrops standing above the wetlands. They were shelter, staging posts on journeys and sacred sites. The paintings that adorn their walls are stories, and Brian knew them all in rich detail. I had already met a number of the characters in Kakadu: Nabulwinjbulwinj who goes about hitting women with a big yam for no good reason, Namarrgan, the lightning man, with stone axes on his knees and elbows to make thunder, and hosts of Namarnde who live in the hollows of trees and entice people to their doom by calling their names - Modigliani figures with six fingers, elongated toes and nipples, and dilly bags for the livers of their victims.

Quite a number of the red and white line drawings are X-rated. Pausing occasionally to give birth, strapping female figures, arms and legs akimbo, toes curled in pleasure, engage in acrobatic orgies with much smaller men. Spirits quarrel, magic string ladies transform themselves into crocodiles, catfish clog the rivers, a fat kangaroo bounds over a ceiling while two sailing ships hoist sail, recording the arrival in these parts of Europeans.

I was stretched out on a stone ledge gazing across the wetlands of the Umorrduk River listening to a wonderful story about the mimis, the little stick figures who like to play practical jokes on people, when Brian suddenly stopped talking. I looked up. A huge King Brown snake was sliding round the edge of a boulder a few feet away. It must have been ten foot long and as thick as a man’s forearm. Very slowly Brian reached across and lifted my hat off my head. With the aim of an Australian spin bowler he tossed it at the snake which turned and slithered away.

The hat went too. A gust of wind had caught it. Blowing suddenly over the edge of the rocks and into the ravine below, £60 worth of brand new Akuba Cattleman hat sank slowly into the dark primeval mud.

“That’s better,” Brian smiled. “A hat with a story to tell. Wear it with pride.”