UNLIKE A HUMAN FACE, it’s difficult to tell the age of a landscape from its appearance. Yet in Kakadu National Park, you can feel it. There’s an ancient energy here, a primordial essence that imbues the earth and runs deep through the marrow of the land.
Our little helicopter soars over the UNESCO World Heritagelisted wetlands of Kakadu. We whizz past rocky rust-coloured escarpments and over sweeping sandstone plateaus. A sudden drop-off in the terrain beneath us reveals a mighty waterfall that glistens with mist. In the afternoon sun, the air is sweet and velvety, and the landscape is glacéed in a marmalade-orange hue. This is Stone Country – home to some of the world’s oldest exposed rock dating back 2.5 billion years. Deep in the belly of the Northern Territory’s Top End, this is a landscape inscribed with Dreaming stories and 65,000 years of Indigenous history.
The Traditional Lands of the Bininj/Mungguy people sing with culture and nature, stretching out in a tapestry of green towards the horizon. There’s the glassy emerald of the water, the
