Day 37 - Goorrandalng Campground, Day 2

Monday, 5 July 2021

By 11am the campground is nearly full, save one. That site gets taken mid-afternoon. Maybe because it was Sunday, we speculate, everyone went home yesterday, leaving the campground half-empty by night-fall. Doesn’t make sense though: it’s midway through school holidays, mid-season for the grey nomads, who generally don’t pay much mind to weekends anyway.

Keep River NP is a gem. We’d heard about it from a fellow traveller a ways back: Don’t miss it if you can, was the advice. It’s not on the radar of most tourist maps or travel itineraries. People are too rushed getting to the Kimberley to the west or Kakadu to the east. Pity on the one hand. On the other, discovering a best-kept-secret is always a bonus for the wayward traveller seeking seclusion. For me, the beauty of this park ranks up there with Kings Canyon.

Unlike other lesser-known parks we’ve been to in the Territory it has walks, six of them. We take the 2.5 kms walk from the campground through the pancake stacks of 320 million year old rock, mostly conglomerate sandstone. The flora is different from what we’ve seen, bloodwood and woolybutt trees, acacias, various grevilleas fanning out their luscious orange blossoms. And new fauna: pied butcherbird and the devilish-looking friarbird, both unique to the top end. The park sits on the meeting edge of the tropics and semi-arid desert land. It looks lush and green, but feels dry.

When we thought about this trip a few months back, the general plan was to do the Gibb River Road through the centre of the Kimberley. The idea to get there via the central road and Northern Territory was an add-on. Why not make a gigantic loop? Doing the Central Road through the desert again sounded fun, but the NT was merely a trip up the Stuart Highway to get to the Victoria Highway to get back to the top end of W.A. to do the outback Kimberley road. Long way around but eventually we'd get there.

We’ve now spent over three weeks in the Territory and Keep River is the eighth national park we’ve visited in the state. With the prolonged border closure, the prospect of doing the Gibb River is dimming, so it’s turning out that the NT is the highlight and focal point of this trip. We’re not sorry. It’s been great to get to know this most remote part of Australia.

As we sit down for our nightly sundowner after a lazy afternoon, we look up at the hill towering above the campground. The sun lights up its western front. See the face? Johan says, pointing to the peak. An old man, grizzly as the rock, rests back, his bulbous nose and jowly cheeks relaxed and proud and protective of his mountain. Gough Whitlam? he suggests (21st prime minister of Australia - indeed it does look a bit like him). Nah, I snort. This is black fella land. That’s their man. Like the natural etching on Uluru, the spirit of the land reveals itself to its stewards in organic form, nature’s art. A sign of their harmonious co-existence and a physical manifestation of their spirituality. In the West, we built grand cathedrals to our gods. In the Dreamtime, the land offers totems to its people.