A Shirt on Sunday: Ngalyod Rainbow Serpent – November 1999 – Kakadu National Park

That’s not what I would consider a serpent, rainbow or otherwise. It’s a crocodile. Okay, it’s also got a touch of the kangaroo about it, but the legs are a dead giveaway in the ‘not a serpent’ evaluation. However, like all tourist-based aboriginal art, it’s unsigned and even at the gift shop there was nothing to explain the image.

The rainbow serpent is central to the Aboriginal creation myths – it is (or they are) the creator of life and the shaper of the land. Details vary between tribes, and unlike Western religions there’s no definitive narrative.

Kakadu National Park is situated right at the top of the Northern Territory, about 2 hours from Darwin and surrounded on 3 sides by Arnhem Land. It covers nearly 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles, or half the size of Switzerland).

Janet and I lived in Sydney in the late 90’s, but by 1999 had moved to London. We still had regular holidays to Australia to visit the family and on one holiday spent a few days in the Northern Territory. Looking at the tourist board web site, not much has changed in 19 years. Kakadu is famous for two things: Aboriginal rock art and crocodiles. The tourist board suggests you go swimming there.

The Adelaide River, Kakadu. Not in Adelaide
We spent a couple of days in the park, not swimming, because we started with the crocodile boat cruise on the Adelaide River. The boat was a two-level affair, with the water-level cabin walled in while the top deck was open for photography and crocodile-baiting.

G'day!

The tour guide had a boat-pole about 4 metres long, from which dangled a rope with a meat hook The rope was long enough to hit the water, so a piece of meat that would make a good Sunday lunch could be dragged through the water. Once a crocodile was interested the game was to make it jump out of the water. Esturine crocodiles grow to about 6 metres long and they can get all of that out of the water vertically, if they feel the urge.

You want a dinosaur? Go adopt a crocodile. Crocodiles have been hanging around in their present evolutionary state for about 65 million years. That means that before the other dinosaurs were extinct, crocodilia had already decided it was time to give up on all this evolution malarkey and stick with being plain evil. During the recent floods in Townsville, crocodiles were spotted swimming along the roads. While it’s not true that every Australian native animal is trying to kill you, these are.

That evening we discovered that crocodile tail curry is really nice – halfway between chicken and monkfish in texture.
Next day we headed out to Ubirr rock and other sites to look at the rock art.

View from the summit of Ubirr Rock, Kakadu

Rock art is an interesting form – the designs have been in existence for generations but the art you see on the rocks is only a few years old. The act of painting forms part of the traditional ceremonial and educational activities of the Aboriginals (and I’m generalising here because I do not claim any expertise). The art is also ephemeral – it can get washed off by a storm and more often over-painted by somebody else. Any rock art site is a confusing mish-mash of images. In Kakadu most of the art is the x-ray style, that shows the rudimentary position if internal organs – useful information if you’re going hunting or fishing.

The main gallery at Ubirr Rock, Kakadu. All the red-orange bits are layers upon layers of paintings
Kangaroo (looking suspiciously like the t-shirt drawing) and hunter;Ubirr Rock, Kakadu

On our trip we saw pictures of barramundi, long-necked turtles, snakes, crocodiles and also white men and guns – the meeting of Europeans and Australian Aboriginals was definitely worth painting for many reasons, most of them regrettable.

Fish and gun, Ubirr Rock, Kakadu

White Man (according to the caption I wrote in the photo album), Ubirr Rock, Kakadu

All of the photos were scanned off the original 1999 prints.