Edition: U.S. / Global

Among the Crocodiles

Published: September 30, 1990
(Page 2 of 3)

Of course, the Kakadu's most famous resident is the crocodile. In Australia the crocodile is so closely associated with Kakadu that some natives refer to the land as ''Dundee country,'' after Mick Dundee, the cinematic but, alas, fictitious crocodile hunter. According to aboriginal legend the crocodile, ginga, was once a man, but one day he fell asleep in some dry grass near a billabong, caught fire and plunged into the water, only to find himself metamorphosised into a crocodile. Today his back is still covered with the ridges and humps caused by the fire.

Though the rivers within the Kakadu are called the Alligator river system there are no alligators, only crocodiles. Both the freshwater and saltwater variety cruise the waters of the Kakadu and the ''salties'' have earned their sobriquet of ''man eater'' at least twice since the park opened. It is, by the way, possible to buy ''crocodile insurance'' for about $8 from the Northern Territory Insurance Office, but to collect the attack must be fatal.

Twenty years ago the future for crocodiles was bleak. If their mothers didn't eat them they would probably end up as expensive handbags in Paris. But in 1971 the Australian Government declared them a protected species and they have since flourished. The best (and safest) ways to view crocodiles within the Kakadu are on a boat cruise or an aerial flight (swimming is strictly forbidden).

Of the two possible water cruises - the Yellow Waters Billabong or the South Alligator River - we took the shorter Yellow Waters. It's difficult not to see crocodiles on either, but the best for seeing birds is the two and a half hour early-morning Yellow Waters cruise. Birdwatchers will be particularly thrilled by this trip. In the dry season (when we were there) the birds of the Kakadu congregate by the shores of the remaining bodies of water to feed and nest. A friendly guide named Ian spent two hours pointing out at least three kinds of kingfishers, a majestic white-bellied sea eagle, several varieties of the screaming kite, the stately jabiru stork (the only stork indigenous to Australia), lots of noisy magpie geese and many others. He also entertained us with what sounded like apocryphal aborigine trivia about birds (like telling us that the aborigines put big lily pads on their heads and sneak up under the magpie geese to grab them from below).

I really did not want to go on the scenic flight. But I had been told by a park ranger that the best way to see the diversity of the landscape was from the air. Besides, the airstrip, in the northeast corner of the park, sits right next to the uranium mine where my sister insisted on taking the free public relations driven tour. My mother, however, is a peace-loving Quaker who refused to tour a mine that produces material for nuclear weapons. Bolstered by the pilot's assurance that they have never had an accident in eight years, my mother and I took the half-hour flight.

The park ranger was right. Because the Kakadu is so flat the idea that such varied landscapes - coastal swamps, floodplains, lowland hills, escarpment, moonsoon rain forest and the plateau - can coexist is an abstraction without the perspective of an airplane. We also saw stampeding herds of the non-native water buffalo that almost destroyed much of the Kakadu's delicate marshland until the Government began systematically eradicating them. During the dry season go early in the day to avoid smoke from the bush fires.

In 1981 Unesco named the Kakadu to its list of World Heritage Properties (a distinction shared with, among others, Yellowstone National Park, the cathedral at Chartres and the pyramids of Egypt). Kakadu is unusual in that it qualified both for its natural wonders and its more than 5,000 rock painting sites.

The park rangers call the major art sites galleries, an awfully stuffy word when you consider this art is found on the underhanging sides of great primordial rocks and mysterious red sandstone caves. Many of the sites are closed off from visitors - partly to protect the paintings and partly to protect the visitors, who may be harmed by the evil spirits who, according to the aborigines, live there.

The Gagadju have no written language, so these paintings are de facto history books that have endured through a stroke of luck -for some reason the pigment bonded with the quartzite rock and in some cases even formed a thin skin of silica that acts as a protective coating. There is some dispute over the age of the paintings within the Kakadu, but conservative estimates still put the earliest at somewhere between 20,000 to 23,000 years old (which makes them about 5,000 years older than the cave paintings at Lascaux, France).

The most recent paintings, or rather repaintings, a traditional aboriginal practice, were done at Nourlangie Rock in 1964 by an aborigine named Nayombolmi. The artist, also known as Barramundi Charlie, grew troubled near the end of his life by the realization that the aboriginal tradition of rock painting was dying (today aboriginal artists paint mostly on bark or canvas and sell the paintings to galleries in places like Alice Springs). He spent his last year painting and repainting the ancient images of the aboriginal ''dreamtime.''