Aboriginal paintings. Nourlangie Rock, Kakadu National Park

Nourlangie rock in the Kakadu National Park (Northern Territory) is one of few places where you can find Aboriginal paintings.

The paintings are not just a matter of the past. Painting on rocks is the Aboriginal way of publishing and any time indigenous people have something to say they create a new painting, often over an old one. That way they describe the tribe history and notes for other families - warning of diseases and dangerous spirits or information about animals that live in the area. Different tribes use different painting styles and it is apparently immediately recognisable who left the message.

Some tribes use what we now call "X-ray painting" – which basically shows animals or people from inside, as if they were X-rayed. They provide information about the position of organs or places where the particular animals collect most fat (the "fat" was apparently appreciated and eaten by elderly people of the tribe).

Aboriginals sometimes print their palms on the top of the picture. There are two reasons for that - firstly the palm print serves as a signature, secondly the print holds the energy of the author (and can be retrieved by touching the print again – but you’re only allowed to do that if you’re an Aboriginal).

Aboriginal tribes speak many different languages but none of them exists in written form. The white settles came up with an English-based transcript – although they made it so sophisticated that neither Aboriginals nor Non-Aboriginals can now read it correctly. (By the way – talking about “the whites” sounds so un-PC that I’d rather call them Non-Aboriginals in the context of this article. Besides, the times when there were only “the Aboriginals” and “the whites” living in Australia are long gone. I put some statistics here )

Kakadu National Park is about as big as half of Switzerland, accommodates all tropical ecosystems and four closed river systems. Much of Kakadu is Aboriginal land, leased to the government for use as a national park. (The fact that there is a uranium mine just around the corner may sound pretty ironic.)

Unless you have a tent, staying overnight in Kakadu may be an expensive business (prices start at around 200$ per night). One of the places to stay is the famous Crocodile Lodge. It looks like a crocodile; the reception is in the head and the guests enter through the crocodile’s open mouth. The lodge can be found in a town of Jabiru originally built to accommodate the Ranger Uranium Mine workers.

Most souvenir boomerangs you can buy in the Territory come from Jabiru. My Aboriginal guide claimed that they are all fake. “I was born here, brought up here and I saw my first boomerang ten years ago and it was in Melbourne." (Kakadu is too woody for boomerang use – after all, you want to hit a kangaroo, not a tree, right?)