Latest news with #MaxDavidson
The Age
10-05-2025
- The Age
In all of Australia you won't find anywhere else like this wonderland
It's dangerous beyond the lodge, I'm warned on arrival. Salt-water crocs can walk long distances across floodplains. But I'm soon in a Land Cruiser riding down mud tracks among forest into escarpment country. It takes only a minute or so to feel like I'm deep in Amurdak territory. The evidence of the thousands of years they spent here is everywhere. At the end of a dirt path that climbs towards huge boulders, I slide on my back under overhangs to find rock art. The passage of time hasn't faded the paintings, and I wonder just how many people have ever seen them. Plenty are easy to, access too. Perhaps the most spectacular painting – a six-metre-long rainbow serpent painted in white and ochre – is barely 10 minutes' drive from the lodge. Buffalo hunter-turned-environmentalist Max Davidson first came here in 1985. By the following year, he'd set up a tourist venture with traditional owners. He'd travelled all over the Top End but he hadn't seen anything quite like this place. That sense of discovery is still palpable here, 40 years on. I'm enthralled by what I'll find on my first boat ride through water channels between paperbark trees. Then we hit a huge estuarine crocodile lolling in the shallows. The impact – and the subsequent splashing by the spooked croc – nearly knock me over the side of the boat. We make it out of the channels and into a lake in time for a fiery Territory sunset. There are more than 275 species of birds in these wetlands; had I come in September, 40,000 magpie geese would've joined the show. There are huge crocs all over, lurking in many waterways we motor down. But it's the sense of history that awes me most. I can feel it pulsing out of the Earth all around me – 1000 and more generations of ancient people who lived here long before, whose ghosts linger long. I find paintings no anthropologist has seen. Off one trail I find human skulls and bones lodged in the crevices of rocks, and middens collected and stacked across thousands of years. There are swimming holes too, with sandy bottoms and crystal-clear waters. I'm a regular in the swimming pool beside the lodge too, since I know it's 100 per cent safe from a croc encounter. Until I reach the bar next door, of course. THE DETAILS
Sydney Morning Herald
10-05-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
In all of Australia you won't find anywhere else like this wonderland
It's dangerous beyond the lodge, I'm warned on arrival. Salt-water crocs can walk long distances across floodplains. But I'm soon in a Land Cruiser riding down mud tracks among forest into escarpment country. It takes only a minute or so to feel like I'm deep in Amurdak territory. The evidence of the thousands of years they spent here is everywhere. At the end of a dirt path that climbs towards huge boulders, I slide on my back under overhangs to find rock art. The passage of time hasn't faded the paintings, and I wonder just how many people have ever seen them. Plenty are easy to, access too. Perhaps the most spectacular painting – a six-metre-long rainbow serpent painted in white and ochre – is barely 10 minutes' drive from the lodge. Buffalo hunter-turned-environmentalist Max Davidson first came here in 1985. By the following year, he'd set up a tourist venture with traditional owners. He'd travelled all over the Top End but he hadn't seen anything quite like this place. That sense of discovery is still palpable here, 40 years on. I'm enthralled by what I'll find on my first boat ride through water channels between paperbark trees. Then we hit a huge estuarine crocodile lolling in the shallows. The impact – and the subsequent splashing by the spooked croc – nearly knock me over the side of the boat. We make it out of the channels and into a lake in time for a fiery Territory sunset. There are more than 275 species of birds in these wetlands; had I come in September, 40,000 magpie geese would've joined the show. There are huge crocs all over, lurking in many waterways we motor down. But it's the sense of history that awes me most. I can feel it pulsing out of the Earth all around me – 1000 and more generations of ancient people who lived here long before, whose ghosts linger long. I find paintings no anthropologist has seen. Off one trail I find human skulls and bones lodged in the crevices of rocks, and middens collected and stacked across thousands of years. There are swimming holes too, with sandy bottoms and crystal-clear waters. I'm a regular in the swimming pool beside the lodge too, since I know it's 100 per cent safe from a croc encounter. Until I reach the bar next door, of course. THE DETAILS
