History
Kakadu National Park is located within the Region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It covers an area of 1,980,400 ha (4,894,000 acres), extending nearly 200 kilometers from north to south and over 100 kilometers from east to west. It is the size of Israel, about one-third the size of Tasmania, or nearly half the size of Switzerland.
Aboriginal people have occupied the Kakadu area continuously for at least 40 000 years. Kakadu National Park is renowned for the richness of its Aboriginal cultural sites. There are more than 5000 recorded art sites illustrating Aboriginal culture over thousands of years. The archaeological sites demonstrate Aboriginal occupation for at least 20 000 and possibly up to 40 000 years.
The cultural and natural values of Kakadu National Park were recognized internationally when the Park was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is an international register of properties that are recognized as having outstanding cultural or natural values of international significance.
Approximately half of the land in Kakadu is Aboriginal land under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and most of the remaining land is currently under claim by Aboriginal people. The areas of the Park that are owned by Aboriginal people are leased by the traditional owners to the Director of National Parks to be managed as a national park. The remaining area is Commonwealth land vested under the Director of National Parks. All of Kakadu is declared a national park under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.
The Aboriginal traditional owners of the Park are descendants of various clan groups from the Kakadu area and have longstanding affiliations with this country. Their lifestyle has changed in recent years, but their traditional customs and beliefs remain very important. About 500 Aboriginal people live in the Park; many of them are traditional owners. All of Kakadu is jointly managed by Aboriginal traditional owners and the Australian Government’s Department of the Environment and Water Resources.
The consensus among scholars for the arrival of humans of Australia is placed at 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, but possibly as early as 70,000 years ago. The earliest human remains found to date are that of Mungo Man which have been dated at about 40,000 years old. At the time of first European Contact the population was split into 250 individual nations, many of which were in alliance with one another, and within each nation there existed several clans, from as few as five or six to as many as 30 or 40. Each nation had its own language and a few had multiple, thus over 250 languages existed, around 200 of which are now extinct.
Indigenous Australians lived and utilized resources on the continent sustainably, agreeing to cease hunting and gathering at particular times to give populations and resources the chance to replenish. Indigenous Australians were amongst the oldest, most sustainable and most isolated cultures on Earth prior to European settlement beginning in 1788.
The Chinese, Malays and Portuguese all claim to have been the first non-Aboriginal explorers of Australia’s north coast. The first surviving written account comes from the Dutch. In 1623 Jan Carstenz made his way west across the Gulf of Carpentaria to what is believed to be Groote Eylandt. Abel Tasman is the next documented explorer to visit this part of the coast in 1644. He was the first person to record European contact with Aboriginal people. Almost a century later, Matthew Flinders surveyed the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1802 and 1803.
Phillip Parker King, an English navigator entered the Gulf of Carpentaria between 1818 and 1822. During this time he named the three Alligator Rivers after the large numbers of crocodiles, which he mistook for alligators.
Ludwig Leichhart was the first land-based European explorer to visit the Kakadu region, in 1845 on his route from Moreton Bay in Queensland to Port Essington in the Northern Territory. He followed Jim Jim Creek down from the Arnhem Land escarpment, then went down the South Alligator before crossing to the East Alligator and proceeding north. A more plausible, if prosaic, explanation for the origin of the name of the park is that Leichardt applied the colloquial German term for a cockatoo, although this is unlikely to sit well with the indigenous historians.
In 1862 John McDouall Stuart travelled along the south-western boundary of Kakadu but did not see any people.
The first non-Aboriginal people to visit and have sustained contact with Aboriginal people in northern Australia were the Macassans from Sulawesi and other parts of the Indonesian archipelago. They travelled to northern Australia every wet season, probably from the last quarter of the seventeenth century, in sailing boats called praus. Their main aim was to harvest trepang (sea cucumber), turtle shell, pearls and other prized items to trade in their homeland. Aboriginal people were involved in harvesting and processing the trepang, and in collecting and exchanging the other goods.
There is no evidence that the Macassans spent time on the coast of Kakadu but there is evidence of some contact between Macassan culture and Aboriginal people of the Kakadu area. Among the artefacts from archaeological digs in the Park are glass and metal fragments that probably came from the Macassans, either directly or through trade with the Coburg Peninsula people.
The British attempted a number of settlements on the northern Australian coast in the early part of the nineteenth century: Fort Dundas on Melville Island in 1824; Fort Wellington at Raffles Bay in 1829; and Victoria Settlement (Port Essington) on the Coburg Peninsula in 1838. They were anxious to secure the north of Australia before the French or Dutch, who had colonised islands further north. The British settlements were all subsequently abandoned for a variety of reasons, such as lack of water and fresh food, sickness and isolation. It is difficult to assess the impact of these settlements on the local Aboriginal people and the type of relationship that developed between them and the British. Certainly, some Aboriginal labour was used at the settlements. Exposure to new sickness was an ever-present danger. As in other parts of Australia, disease and the disruption it caused to society devastated the local Aboriginal population.
Water Buffalo had a big influence on the Kakadu region as well. By the 1880s the number of buffaloes released from early settlements had increased to such an extent that commercial harvesting of hides and horns was economically viable.
The industry began on the Adelaide River, close to Darwin, and moved east to the Mary River and Alligator Rivers regions.
Most of the buffalo hunting and skin curing was done in the dry season, between June and September, when buffaloes congregated around the remaining billabongs.
During the wet season hunting ceased because the ground was too muddy to pursue buffalo and the harvested hides would rot. The buffalo-hunting industry became an important employer of Aboriginal people during the dry-season months.
Kakadu is located in the tropics, between 12° and 14° south of the Equator. The climate is monsoonal, characterised by two main seasons: the dry season and the rain season. The ‘build up’ describes the transition between the dry and the rain. During the dry season (from April/May to September), dry southerly and easterly trade winds predominate. Humidity is relatively low and rain is unusual. At Jabiru, the average maximum temperature for June-July is 32 °C.During the 'build up' (October to December) conditions can be extremely uncomfortable with high temperatures and high humidity. However 'build up' storms are impressive and lightning strikes are frequent. In fact the Top End of Australia records more lightning strikes per year than any other place on earth. At Jabiru the average maximum temperature for October is 37.5 °C.
The rain season (January to March/April) is characterised by warm temperatures and, as one would expect, rain. Most of the rain is associated with monsoonal troughs formed over Southeast Asia, although occasionally tropical cyclones produce intense heavy rain over localised areas. At Jabiru the average maximum temperature for January is 33 °C.Annual rainfall in Kakadu National Park ranges from 1,565 mm in Jabiru to 1,300 mm in the Mary River region.
Most non Aboriginal people really only refer to the rain and dry seasons, but Aboriginal people Bininj/Mungguy identify as many as six seasons in the Kakadu region:
- Gunumeleng - mid-October to late December, pre-monsoon storm season with hot weather and building thunderstorms in the afternoons
- Gudjewg - from January to March, monsoon season with thunderstorms, heavy rain, and flooding; the heat and humidity generate an explosion of plant and animal life
- Banggerreng - April, the "knock 'em down storm" season where floodwater recedes but violent, windy storms knock down grasses
- Yegge - from May to mid-June, relatively cool with low humidity, the Aboriginal people historically started burning the woodlands in patches to 'clean the country' and encourage new growth for grazing animals
- Wurrgeng - from mid-June to mid-August, the cold weather season with low humidity; most creeks stop flowing and the floodplains quickly dry out
- Gurrung - from mid-August to mid-October, hot dry weather with ever shrinking billabongs.
Periods of torrential rain and long dry spells mean that Kakadu can change its appearance according to the season, so is a place deserving of more then one visit.
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