Kakadu National Park
Kakadu is one of Australia's favourite National Parks. Located in the Northern Territory it is managed by the Indigenous Traditional Owners as well as the Director of National Parks.
There are seven regions of Kakadu National Park, all very different from one another. This regions are the South Alligator Area, Jabiru Area, East Alligator Area, Nourlangie Area, Yellow Water Area, Mary River Area and the Jim Jim Area. Each region offers its own camping grounds and other accommodation facilities for tourists.
The Kakadu National Park has made the World Heritage List in 1981. It is so special due to the diversity of the land, and the history of Indigenous Australians who have inhibited this land for more then 50,000 years. The Bininj/Munnguy people still call the park home today. Home to a unique ecosystem which consists of tidal flats, flood plains, lowlands and plateaus. This ecosystems offers habitat to a range of endangered and unique range of plants and animals, who roam freely around the park (Although not onto the camping and accommodation facilities).
Offering Visitors and Cultural Centres which are open to the public from 8 am to 5 pm daily. These centres help you to organise your trip around Kakadu, it will also give you an insight into the tours, culture and history of the park. Activities available to help you see the park and experience its unique beauty first hand are a range of ranger guided tours, wildlife tours, walks through the park, tours to see the rock art sights, fishing and boating facilities are available as well as scenic flights, boat and four wheel drive tours.
This park offers everything to help tourists learn about the ecosystem around them, about the wildlife, history of Indigenous Australian culture as well as the history of the park it self.
There are a number of land management systems available to help protect the land, its inhabitants, and those visiting the area. One of these systems is the Estuarine Crocodile Management, designed to protect the local crocodiles but at the same to minimise the risk of any crocodile attacks in the area. To do this several times a year park staff will obtain data on distribution, numbers and size of the local Crocodiles. If an animal is found that's behavior or size is seen as a threat to humans or other animals they will then be captured, tagged and released in another area.
Other management systems include the Feral Animal Management. Feral animals destroy Australia's native plants and in the doing so making it difficult for Australia's native animals to survive. Animals required to be controlled include Buffalo, Horses, Pigs, Cats, Dogs and the dreaded Cane Toad which has started destroying Australia's land. Cane Toads where first found in Kakadu National Park on the 12th of March 2001. These toads are poisonous to both animals and land around them. With still no protective measures in place, the Australian Government is working towards a way to control Cane Toads from harming Australia.
Kakadu is a favourite amongst travellers and a National Park which must be visited at least once in a life time to truly appreciate the land that is Australia as well as its history and culture.
Kakadu, your name is Music - A personal perspective
Feel relaxed. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stretch your hands like an eagle swimming in the rivers of space, joyously, yes thankfully. There is a sense of rebirth surrounding you. Or you feel yourself in the embrace of a soothing, balming river. It all looks like the world just rolling out of the primordial womb with you peering out from the ship, the human body, inside which you sail effortlessly in space, in Nature we mean to say, that envelopes you, cuddles you, like the baby in the arms of loving mama and papa, mum and dad.
It’s all gone now, the false solidity of the human body, that encampment that, through the jaundiced logic of one against the other of the discrete binary thought, has been trained to close out, shut out, select, separate, build walls against the shared space, the other smile, the other self, the same self. Now in National Kakadu Park and a return to Nature in purity the feeling you get and which has always been yours is that of a flowing body, the bodyflow of feeling, your feeling, the feeling of love. Welcome to Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Kakadu National Park with its lofty trees that have defeated age by living time instead of counting it and by breathing with space of their treehood, the earth below and the heaven above, and so doing having the sea, the bird, indeed the world in them, is a reminder to the paradise lost and an invitation to the regained that awaits the visitor to this ageless park.
It is the case that through the human enstrangement from Nature that resulted from the very otherness that justifies the banishment of the natural environment, another other of the other, from the self that leaves the being homeless and isolated, it is difficult to see the tree in us, the river in us, indeed all of us in Nature and Nature in us even if we have to accept the air and the water in us which are flows in Nature as they are flows in us too.
Kakadu National Park is an invitation to the beauty of diversity that is beyond counting. We have them amany, indeed aplenty, the trees, the birds, the lakes and others that we are getting to know here, perhaps meeting for the first time, before we visit them later for cuddling and caress in Kakadu. However it it is not in their being ten or thousand that matters as much as their being species within species that they are as we are.
As the waterfalls roller and holler, rumble, ramble and tumble on rocks that stand straight and solid like the foot of the tree on earth and in the soil between which they meander, the geese engage in a kind of game to which human beings are yet to invent a name, moving together, flapping their feathers together, flowing like the waterfalls together like they have an appointment with the princess on her wedding day who has been waiting for them with the prince and the marriage contingent such that the ceremony can begin at last, at last when the geese arrived with news from their home, the Kakadu National Park flip-flapping Jim Jim, the name of the waterfalls in Kakadu as they arrived at last.
The ceremony begins with a report from the geese about Kakadu National Park. They talk about rocks that sit and stand there in defiance of time. These rocks are not just attractive because if it is that alone, it will soon be over with age and could be rubbished by place but are simply beautiful in the ruggedness of their appearance which towers them above the crucible of experience that goes with place and age.
We got to know from the geese of Kakadu National Park that they are happy about the recognition of their, our UNESCO of their habitat as the World Heritage Site. And as for the issue about Jabiluka, they express their understanding for the human needs. It is about the balancing of odds that is not only inside the human beings themselves but also in Nature too. The recognition of and the respect for the needs of the other is the heart of love, they say and they are happy that UNESCO and the Australian government have got the answer for Jubilika which finds its place inside a natural paradise.
In their sonorous way they say something that has the halo of reverence for the environment and as the word internet drops from their beaks. And here you have the site in the web!
http://www.environment.gov.au/ssd/supervision/arr-mines/jabiluka/index.html.
All of this is what the geese bring from Kakadu National Park as invitation to the princess and the prince and the marriage contingent, yes to you and yours, in the land that constrasts with their own, a land, the human space which is inundated with wants and awash with wishes that are so tall that the natural resources cannot even satisfy them and so the people have to fight for the expansion of their corners. In Kakadu National Park, the sky is the host and the earth is hostess to all.
It is not that they haven’t their wants too in Kakadu, say the geese, but they trust that Nature shall provide because that’s the divine promise and in thick and thin and even when the land cracks under the lashing tongue of the sun, the promise has never failed. They have always bounced back. As when they have to go without the paraphernalia of rocking and heaving that characterizes the human imitation of their given ability, they just zoom to the heavens flapping the wings, singing “Come to Kakadu! The eagle is waiting for you with acrobatic performance from which you can learn how to lie on the strand with hands stretched, breathing the environment in you. The crocodile is waiting to glide on the foot of wool from which you can learn how to walk gracefully. Strange and many they are, the inhabitants of Kakadu. Come, return to the peace of the earth, our common heritage. The rise of one is the rise of all. One head produces a world of its kind. And when the heart flows into such a head, then we say, that’s Kakadu where love flows in peace to produce unity in diversity of outlook, look, expectations, needs, struggles, hope. We are all waiting for your visit.” Yes Kakadu is waiting for your visit.
You need to be here in Kakadu to see that you are back again to that which was lost along the way after the birth from the primordial womb. And the aboriginal place and arts that constitute the home of the park provides the shortest route to a return to heartland in which one lives in harmony in all and all in one.
