Katherine

You probably know the story already, but back in the 1800s, it was difficult to transport stuff around the centre of Australia. It’s mainly desert, and apart from the east coast, the remaining areas suited to productive use are isolated and far apart. Horses were unsuitable for desert conditions, so camels and their cameleers came to Australia. According to folklore, the cameleers were Afghans from Afghanistan, but actually they were mainly Pakistanis. They provided transport through these areas until trucks and roads became cheaper and put them out of business. The cameleers then released their camels into the wild, and the camels became another major feral animal disaster for Australia. We have more wild camels than anywhere else in the world. The camels destroy waterholes that other animals depend upon. They’re huge - more than 10 times the size of a kangaroo - so they eat a lot of food our native animals could have available to them. Other animals were also used - donkeys and water buffalo are also feral.

But the main transport was the Afghan camel train. So when the train line was built from Adelaide to Darwin, it was called the Ghan. In the late 1800s South Australia included the Northern Territory, and the state tried to build the entire railway line. Unfortunately, according to our bus driver, they ran out of money for it when it had been partly built in South Australia, and became bankrupt as a result. So the commonwealth government stepped in and bought the Northern Territory from South Australia, and helped to complete the line as far as Alice Springs. The story seems a bit more prosaic - South Australia is probably the poorest state, and the Northern Territory has always cost a lot of money and has a really tiny population, so South Australia asked the commonwealth to take it over. The rest wasn’t completed until 2004. It’s now one of the long rail journeys of the world, and today I’m on it.

The passenger train is a commercial tourist journey, so you travel for a bit, have an “off train experience”, then travel for a bit more. It’s three days from Adelaide to Darwin and four the way I’m going, from Darwin to Adelaide. The first stop is Katherine, where you can do various off train experiences in Katherine or Nitmiluk Gorge, or do what I did, and go to Cutta Cutta caves.

Like Darwin, Katherine is a wet tropical climate, and there are lots of farms in the area, growing mangos amongst other things.

The area is karst - limestone country - and I saw lots of it as we went to the caves.

I really enjoyed the caves, although they were quite hot and humid towards the end, as the cave has only one entrance and the hot air comes in and heats up in the cave. The cave’s floor is mud, so there are few stalagmites, and the decorative features are muddy coloured, but it was very wide and spacious. During the wet season the cave fills with water almost to the top. 

There’s some petrified mud in the cave, and the scientists are waiting for it to drop so they can analyse it.

I was glad I did this experience, as it was 41C, and at least one person on the Nitmiluk Gouge Cruise got heat stroke.