Day 31 - Katherine, NT

Tuesday, 29 June 2021

Few people realise that Australia’s population density is just short of three-and-a-half people per square kilometre. To dip under that you’d need to go to Namibia or Mongolia. That's it. That’s a lot of personal space and even though Australian cities’ are as crowded as anywhere else in the world, the freedom of wide open spaces with plenty of room to breathe is a core value for most Aussies.

For bush campers it’s even greater. Most of our camps on this trip have had two people per square kilometre, Johan and me. Much of the time there’s no one in a coo-ee of 10 or even 100 kilometres of our camp.

So turning up at the Riverview Tourist Village in Katherine is an exercise in breathing deep and reigning in our outsized sense of personal space. We’re assigned space number nine, a thin and narrow dirt patch bordered on one side by a green corrugated iron fence with two strips of barbed wire on top and views of the tops of vine-covered cabs in the semi-truck graveyard next door. We’re lucky that no one’s in space number ten so we can spread out a bit, visually if not physically. But just before dusk a Holden turns up and a weary-looking young couple pop out, pitch a lightweight tent, then promptly get back in their car and drive off. 

Lots one through nine at the Riverview Tourist Village have roughly sixteen square metres per campsite to park your camper, your vehicle and whatever space is left over for your camp chairs. None of us have access to power, which was understood, but neither do we have water taps or waste drains, which wasn’t. Plus we get the unsurpassed serenade of truck traffic on the Victoria Highway for all but the wee hours of the morning.

Still, there’s two bonuses to the RTV: it exists under a canopy of some of the most expansive and delightful tropical trees you’ll find anywhere in Katherine, providing shade for most campers for most of the day. Second, there’s a gate along the back fence (where the really beautiful, spacious camping sites are) that leads to a trail down into the Katherine River valley and the small gorge from which a natural thermal spring burbles out from deep within the bowels of the earth. The small pool it creates eventually overflows into a tree-lined narrow channel that feeds another pool that flows into another channel and on and on until it reaches the main river some 100 metres away.

So first thing this morning, before the crowds descend upon the popular Katherine site, we don our bathers and head for the pool. We arrive just after 7am. Two bright-pink-bikini-clad young women have set up cameras to take pictures of themselves floating on their plastic tubes in various perky positions. We swim past their focal range and jump into the small pool from where the source springs. It’s private, delightfully clean and surrounded by lush river flora. Rivals anything you’d find in Bali.

Eventually, like yesterday, we float down the channels and then, because the morning’s still cool, rather than walking the path back to the original platform, we swim against the tide, through the pull of the channels, over the natural rock dam and back into the first pool, which is now full of morning pleasure seekers.

The rest of the day is, as expected, spent cleaning, working, sorting, shopping. We don’t come to urban caravan parks for the fun of it. By day’s end we discover no one has put cans of beer in the fridge from our stores under the seats of the trailer. What about trying out a Katherine pub for a cool pint instead? Bit of fun in Katherine never hurts.

At 5:08pm we embark on a walk through town to kill time before the 5:30pm opening of the “beer garden” we parked in front of. By 5:35pm the front entrance still hasn’t opened and Johan discovers a small sign suggesting we should enter around the side. We go looking for the side entrance but can’t find it. Yet another example of cryptic NT signage.

So we head to the next on the Google search list and end up at the Barrel and Cruse Bistro, which regrettably hasn’t taken advantage of their close proximity to the Katherine River to create a river-view terrace. The “beer garden” has a large colourful kids play gym next to it and three TVs, all broadcasting different stations. We order a couple of pints, chose a tall table in front of one of the TVs airing the ABC News updates on the current COVID “crises” across Australia, and eventually order dinner. 

Johan’s curry is tasty, the chicken a bit gummy. My burger is a high-piled sloppy mess of gristly meat, beetroot, egg, and bacon falling out the sides. When my pile of rejected gristle gets unreasonably high I grab my plate and take it to the counter: for a $24 burger, advertising “grass-fed Angus steak”, this is one of the worst burgers I’ve ever eaten. It’s the new cook, the woman owner apologizes, I’ll let him know, and offers to refund my money. He probably just needs to buy something other than the cheapest chuck, I suggest. I head back to the table to finish the sweet potato chips I’d swept off the platter and help myself to a couple spoonfuls of chicken curry from Johan’s side of the table. 

Even in the worst of times, we try to bend towards the half-full version of reality. A friend writes that when they end up in some awful caravan park situation, she tries to remember the refugee camps the world over, how their suffering makes ours pale by comparison. From Wordsworth to the New Age, the idea that "beauty exists in everything" is a worthy refrain to pull us from our imagined misery. The artwork of tree canopies. Healing waters. Boisterous barks from tropical birds our morning wake-up call. Nice camp neighbours to exchange travel stories with. Katherine hasn't been half bad after all.