Today is our last day in Kakadu National Park before we start heading south on our 3,800 kilometre (2,400 mile) trip back to Melbourne.
We had mentally divided Kakadu into three regions – Central (Nourlangie Rock), South (Yellow Waters) and North (Ubirr). The northern section was our destination for today.
Ubirr is approximately 40 km from Jabiru along a good sealed road. The road is OK in the dry season but access may be restricted during periods of heavy rain in the wet season.
There were many floodways that the road crossed and the area around them was so much more green than the rest of the area.
At Ubirr, a short walk from the car park led past the main Aboriginal art sites to the foot of Ubirr Rock. The rock faces at Ubirr have been continuously painted and repainted since 40,000 BC. Most paintings there were created about 2000 years ago but some have been repainted right up to modern times. There are three main galleries of art accessible to visitors.
The art depicts certain creation ancestors as well as food animals from the area such as barramundi, catfish, mullet, goannas, long-necked turtles, pig-nosed turtles, rock ringtail possums, and wallabies.
The main gallery is perhaps the most photographed, and contains many examples of “X-ray art”. Also in the main gallery you can see paintings of white men with their hands on hips, and, high up, Mimi spirits, who are so thin that they can apparently slip in and out of cracks in the rock. I don’t know how the artists managed to reach many of the areas of rock to paint the Mimi spirits. The cultural explanation is that the Mimi spirits painted the pictures themselves, and brought the rock down to ground level to do so.
At the northern end of the main gallery you can see a painting of a thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) which has been extinct in the area for about 2000 years. It shows just how old some of these paintings are.
The Rainbow Serpent gallery is the most sacred site at Ubirr, and is traditionally a women-only site, although this rule is relaxed for non-indigenous people. This is the spot visited by the Rainbow Serpent or “Garranga’rreli”, during her path across the top end of Australia, during the ‘Dreaming’. As she crossed the land, she “sang” the rocks, plants, animals, and people into existence. This path, or songline, is still a sacred path to the indigenous people who live in northern Australia.
From the top of Ubirr rock there is a panoramic view of the floodplains and escarpments. I had to clamber up a series of rock steps to get to the lookout. A few decades ago, I would have hopped from rock to rock, but these days I manage these steep rock clambers very gingerly.
We were looking out for a place for lunch and decided that since this was our third day of 38C temperatures, we would head back the lake at Jabiru with its green grass and shady area and a number of picnic tables. We ate a pleasant picnic lunch along with the screeches of hundreds of Flying Foxes that inhabit many of the shade trees around the lake. I’m not sure what they do all day – probably, just hang around.
A little way down the road is Jabiru Airport and the Ranger Mine which was a large uranium mine. The site is surrounded by, but excised from the Kakadu National Park. An orebody of uranium oxide was discovered here in late 1969 and the mine commenced operation in 1980, reaching full production in 1981. It ceased mining operations in 2012 leaving a large stockpile of ore which was processed for many years.
Uranium mined at Ranger was sold for use in nuclear power stations in Japan, South Korea, China, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the United States.
