In Australia’s Northern Territory, David Whitley finds that a different mindset is required to truly appreciate a unique National Park that often leaves visitors mildly disappointed.

Though frequently touted as perhaps the greatest of Australia’s natural treasures, the Kakadu National Park doesn’t win you over immediately. There are some incredible lookouts to head for, and there are a few fabulous waterfalls, but it’s not the sort of place to come to for quick fixes. If you blunder in just wanting a few postcard shots to say you’ve ‘done’ it, you’re probably going to end up disappointed with the sprawling miles of woodland, the odd rocky outcrop and the vast floodplains.

Kakadu just doesn’t work within the traditional western context. It is the only National Park in the world that covers an entire river system and it’s not about highlights reels of good stuff – it’s about how a remarkable environment fits together and the striking changes within it from season to season. The westernized view of four distinct seasons – winter, spring, summer and autumn – just doesn’t work here. And neither, really, does the wet and dry season system that most of us tend to stick with as a handy rule of thumb replacement.

In reality, it’s a lot more complex than that. The local Aboriginal people (of which there is more than one group – see, told you it was complex) work on the basis of six seasons. The monsoon tends to hit between December and March, but it’s followed by the harvest season around April and then a cooler-but-still-humid season. The cool dry, the hot dry and the pre-monsoon follow that.

As such, what you’ll see at the same place at different times of the year can be completely different. Many roads are completely impassable during the monsoons, and the only way to see the likes of Jim Jim Falls in January or February is to fly over in a helicopter. You’re likely to see the most fearsome torrents angrily pounding downwards. Yet turn up in August, and you can drive down, walk up to the falls and see little more than a trickle.

Fire plays as big a part in this landscape as water, however. Vast tracts of forest will burn down every year, partly due to lightning strikes and partly due to Aboriginal fire management. Fire has never been about destroying life here, but sustaining it and spreading it. Many seeds require fire to help them spread, while burning prey out of a hiding place is a traditional way of getting food. Without the fires, you’d get infernos too. National Park staff conduct controlled burns every year to prevent the woodland getting too dense and dangerous.

They’re conducting one of these burns when we reach the top of Ubirr rock, one of Kakadu’s genuine stunners. The flames lick at the trees attempting to grow on the slopes as smoke pours round to the north. To our east is the most vivid field of green you could possibly imagine, and it is dotted with a few puddles. This is the floodplain of the East Alligator River, which separates Kakadu from Arnhem Land. It’s a wildlife haven, and geese descend upon it in flocks. Around one-third of Australia’s bird species can be found in Kakadu; some are permanent, some are more fickle seasonal migrants.

The point is that not everyone will see this horizon of lurid grass, framed by fire. We’ve arrived in mid-May and if we’d arrived two months earlier, it would have been underwater; to all intents and purposes we could be looking out to sea. Turn up two months later, and we’d more than likely be confronted with a parched-looking golden landscape as the grass dries in the sun.

It’s these changes and natural forces that make Kakadu an amazing place. It’s not about the view from the top of the rocks; it’s about being a tiny part of something so huge, so complex and so alien.

Disclosure: David was a guest of the Gagudju Crocodile Holiday Inn (holidayinn.com).

By David Whitley