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SEVEN SPIRIT BAY
We trace the contours of northern Australia’s coastline from the vantage of a twin-propeller plane. The scene below us is a shifting mirage of land and sea that stretches unendingly into the horizon until the pilot banks left to home in on a red-dirt airstrip that seems to appear out of nowhere. We land at the ironically named international airport – with its tin-roofed shelter and not much else – and clamber into an open-back 4WD to be whisked to our destination through bush thick with stringybark and palms, eyes peeled all the way for wild buffaloes, bantengs and ponies.
Fabled wilderness lodge Seven Spirit Bay is hidden on the Cobourg Peninsula, a scallop-edged finger of West Arnhem Land that uncurls into the Arafura Sea north of Kakadu and forms part of Garig Gunak Barlu National Park. Home to saltwater crocodiles, manta rays, dolphins, turtles, pilot whales and the endangered dugong, this marine sanctuary is also the site of the world’s first RAMSAR-listed wetland. And, run under a joint arrangement between the Arrarrkbi people and the Northern Territory’s Parks and Wildlife Commission that dates back to 1981, Garig Gunak Barlu National Park was the first in Australia to be formally managed in partnership with its Traditional Owners.
A trailblazer itself, when Seven Spirit Bay was built in 1990 it was
