In all of Australia you won’t find anywhere else like this wonderland
There’s a communal bar at Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris. Territorians would call it fancy, not because it serves expensive French champagne, it doesn’t; but because the beer’s icy cold.
The further into the Top End you go, the harder it is to get a cold drink. The diesel to feed the generator keeping the fridge running has to come from Darwin, five hours’ drive down a bumpy dirt road. Come the wet season, the road’s impassable.
Sunsets don’t get prettier, or more private, than here.
There’s a bloke holding court by the bar; he barely comes up to my chest. But he’s got a croc story to tell. Says he got stuck at a creek crossing not far from here. His 4WD stalled, he got out in knee-deep water and a four-metre-long croc grabbed him by the leg. He rolls up his trousers: there’s no skin, just scar tissue.
“Don’t tell me you wrestled it?” I ask him.
“Nah, just won the screaming contest,” he answers with a chuckle.
Travel the whole country and you won’t find another place like Davidsons Arnhemland Safaris. Jabiru, the main township of outback tourist icon, Kakadu National Park, might be barely 20 minutes away by air; but this place is its own private wonderland, overlooked by all but the few of us gathered around the bar swapping croc stories.
This part of Arnhem Land is home to some of the most significant Aboriginal art on Earth.
Located on land owned and managed by the Amurdak people, who’ve been here over 50,000 years, this 700-square-kilometre parcel of Arnhem Land is considered one of the planet’s richest Indigenous cultural sites, home to thousands of paintings from 100 to 30,000 years old.
You might get in during the dry season by road, but the view from a Cessna on its way into a red earth airstrip is worth the extra tariff. Below me are nothing but rugged sandstone ranges fringed by billabongs, flood plains, paperbark swamps and monsoonal rainforest. Thousands of travellers descend on Kakadu every dry season, but few come here. There are 20 cabins spread across the bush outside the bar, but they’re never full, and anyway, management’s policy is to keep numbers to a minimum.
