Friday 23 August 2024 – Our stay in Darwin was really more of a staging post between the Kimberley cruise and the next segment of our Australia trip, more of which later. However, we had a whole day here, and it was to be filled with an excursion to Litchfield National Park, about 100km south of Darwin. The tour was included in our formal itinerary, but entry tickets to the park were not. These are only available online, so we stumped up the AU$10 each before we set out. At no stage were we asked for evidence that we’d paid our dues, by the way. I don’t know how, or even if, it’s policed in any way.
Anyway, the itinerary included some interesting-looking items, such as seeing termite mounds, rivers and waterfalls, and some of less, OK no, interest – going for a dip by the rivers and waterfalls. It was billed as a “small group” tour, and turned out to be 17 people on a small bus
on a tour led by Emily.
The park was about a 90-minute drive, which included a coffee-and-loo stop
and travel through a countryside which showed some evidence of burning.
Much of the burning was intentional, programmatic and necessary, though there was some evidence of an incidental bush fire – nothing major, though, just some smoking undergrowth.
The indigenous people have developed a detailed understanding of the “right way” to go about burning the bush. Although not nomadic, they would move between seasonal locations, gathering food according to the location, weather and climate. Having harvested, they would burn the area before moving on; so when they returned later on, there was fresh growth breaking through to be harvested again. The controlled burning also removed much of the flammable detritus in the undergrowth so that lightning strike-induced fires were less likely to burn out of control.
On the topic of the indigenous peoples, one of the learnings for me of this trip is of the highly variegated nature of the indigenous cultural geography. Emily told us about the various indigenous peoples whose land we were travelling through, mentioning that the Australian land mass was actually split into some 250 countries, each with its own indigenous people. There’s a very good interactive map, which gives more details, but here’s the overview.
After a while, Emily swung off the road and parked up for our view of the two sorts of termite mounds on display. Termites split broadly into two types – wood-eating and grass-eating – and the first evidence we saw was of the work of grass-eating termites, and plenty of them, too.
If you view from an angle, you can see that each mound is actually a blade-like construction
and each blade is aligned north-south along Earth’s magnetic field. Hence, the termites are called Magnetic Termites. In mounds built this way the termites receive the warmth of the sun on their eastern and western sides in the morning and evening while exposing less surface to the sun at midday when the nest might overheat.
Each mound belongs to a single queen, who pumps out eggs for several years; while she does this, worker termites are maintaining and growing each mound, the building work being visible as spikes of new material at the top.
When the queen dies, then that’s the end of the colony in that mound; vacated mounds can be distinguished by their lack of spikes.
Eventually, the mounds simply collapse and all the nutrients in their construction are returned to the earth. What causes the collapse? Mainly rain. In the wet season, the fields which look so dry in the photos above can be covered in water, and it’s this which undermines the decaying mounds.
As well as the Magnetic Termite mounds, there were some of the more conventional style of mound, called cathedral mounds. We had seen plenty of these as we drove along, but there were a couple of monsters at the site where we’d stopped.
Here’s the same thing, with people for scale.
Following the termite mound viewings were visits to three water features. The first was the Florence Falls
which can be seen from a convenient viewpoint, and then visited by going down some 135 steps
and past the odd occasional sylvan scene.
I had formed a sort of half-hope that I might be able to take a photo of the falls without too many people in it, but it was clear, as we arrived, that this would be unlikely.
Sure, I could take a photo of the falls
but the wider picture was all full of people.
It seems that Australians are incapable of passing by a scene like this without throwing themselves in, something which requires too much faffing about to be of any interest to me. But it was a hot day, and I suppose it’s a way of cooling off.
In the trees surrounding the falls there were flying foxes – fruit bats.
And Jane captured a photo which demonstrates very clearly why Pandanus is sometimes called “screw pine”.
The second water feature, Buley Rockholes, was less dramatic
but equally crowded.
The third, Wangi Falls, was probably the most photogenic.
The other entertainment for the day was a “crocodile cruise”, on the Adelaide River. Having seen some crocodiles as we cruised the Kimberley, I guess I was expecting a quiet half-hour pottering up and down the river spotting crocodiles. On the other hand, as we approached our cruise, there were signs for “Jumping Croc Tours” and similar, so I began to wonder if we would see something a bit more dynamic. I half-remember a crocodile cruise in the USA, about 30 years ago, where we were treated to the sight of a largish croc called Elvis leaping out of the water to catch bait dangled for him.
Our cruise leader was a chap called Rex
who ran a small and slightly ramshackle operation, but who was friendly, quite well-organised and knowledgeable. He spent a reasonable amount of time explaining that we were dealing with saltwater crocodiles (“salties”), which are large, voracious and very, very dangerous – so no limbs or extremities outside the boat, or even camera lenses, as these could be the target of an attack. He pointed out that crocodiles, like sharks, have been unchanged by evolution over millions of years – in other words they are as good at their job as they could be, and that job involves stealth, aggression and voraciousness. We noted that Rex was wearing a gun.
After the preliminaries, we went off on to his boat –
– the smallest on the river, apparently, but still well-guarded with bars and solid steel mesh, only slightly bent, he told us, in encounters with salties – and set off, with Rex telling us about the life of crocodiles on the Adelaide River.
Salties are very different from fresh water crocodiles (called, logically enough, “freshies”) – larger, much more aggressive and highly territorial. We started off in the territorial waters of a large male called Sneaky. Whilst we waited for him, there was the opportunity of capturing a couple of shots of local bird life.
It seemed the parrots weren’t too afraid of the hawk, though.
Rex attracted Sneaky to the boat using chunks of chicken dangled off a pole. A long pole. When he turned up, it was quite disconcerting to see how big he was and how evil he looked.
He was called Sneaky for a reason – he actually managed to snaffle the first piece of chicken whilst it was still underwater, but eventually Rex was able to get him to jump and take the bait. It was so swift and dramatic, that it was impossible adequately to capture by photo or video – for one chicken nugget he jumped so high that his head was higher than the roof of the boat; then he crashed against the side of the boat as he went down, which was really rather alarming.
Rex wasn’t just doing circus tricks; our time with him was quite educational as well as being disconcertingly dramatic. He introduced us to a female called Flicker, whom he also inveigled into taking bait, but he explained that she had to be cautious because Sneaky, the alpha male of the stretch of water, was still around.
We moved up the river into another male’s territory. This one was called Gnasher. He’s a big bastard.
We also had a visit from a whole herd of Whistling Kites.
On the way back to his dock, Rex explained to us the import of territoriality. Any stretch will have an alpha male; alpha status is settled by fighting, if necessary to the death, and imposes a kind of order to the crocodile community. So when it was decided that there were too many crocodiles (for which, read: too many people killed in accidents) and it was decided to cull some of the alpha males, the result was actually carnage. Instead of making the river safer, it resulted in a whole series of fights as the remaining crocodiles established the new chomping order. It’s now reasonably accepted that culling is not a good idea, and the crocs are allowed to get on with life in their own way.
The crocs we saw today were much larger and more frightening than any others I had come across, and my respect for them has only increased. It was an entertaining and educational hour or so we spent with Rex.
After that was just the journey back to the hotel and preparation for the morrow when, as I say, we embark on the next segment of our Australian trip. We will travel from Darwin to Adelaide; exactly how we go about this is something you’ll have to come back and read about another day.