Going through the gorge

On our third day, we started by visiting Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge),one of the most visited places in the top end. It’s actually made up of 13 gorges, separated by rock platforms. About a billion and a half years ago, the Arnhem Land Plateau is sandstone that was created in a shallow sea between about two and a half and one and a half billion years ago. It was then uplifted to be higher than the Himalayas today. As it was sandstone, it gradually eroded, over a billion years becoming the very cracked and jagged landscape you can see today in Kakadu and Nitmiluk. Erosion cross hatched the plateau as can be seen if you look at Katherine Gorge in google maps satellite view. The Katherine Gorge itself zig zags along the lines of erosion and the rock platforms are at some of the intersections.

The cruise starts at the lowest point of the river (left end of google map), and the gorge walls are quite high. The first few gorges are the longest, so even though we only cruised up two, we covered about half of the length of the gorges. At the rock platform, we got out, walked across the platform for about half a kilometre, and got into another boat to go up the second gorge. Then we came back.

Of course, at the moment, the river is low. During the wet season, a couple of metres of rain falls, the entire gorge becomes a raging torrent and the rock platforms become submerged under metres of water. In this photograph, the water usually rises to the top of the second cave during the wet season. This would be about 18 metres up.

At that time of year, salt water crocodiles can make their way into the gorges, but they are removed at the beginning of the dry season. This area is a preferred habitat for the fresh water crocodiles, and they’re eaten by salties. The sand banks on the river are where freshies lay their eggs.

On the rock platform we crossed, there were rock paintings high up. I guess that if they were lower, they wouldn’t survive a year, let alone the thousands they may have. 

Where the river turns, you can see the other eroded gullies forming the cross hatching.

It’s a very beautiful place.

We then went to Pine Creek, where gold was mined, for lunch. Afterwards, we went to the Adelaide River War Cemetery. The people who were killed in the sixty-one Japanese bombing attacks on Darwin in WWII were buried here.