Jatbula Trail: Nitmiluk (Katherine Gorge) to Leliyn (Edith Falls), Northern Territory

The Jatbula Trail is named after Peter Jatbula, a traditional Jawoyn elder pivotal in securing land rights for his people. The trail weaves its way across the western edge of the Arnhem Land escarpment, following ancient songlines walked by the Jawoyn for thousands of years. 

It is a five-day walk; not a long walk, just 60 kilometres from Nitmiluk Gorge to Leliyn, but a remote and entrancing walk through natural and cultural landscapes full of spiritual significance for the Jawoyn Traditional Owners. Dreaming beings in the form of humans, animals and plants brought this landscape to life by ‘putting themselves’ in the country. Their actions can be seen in features of the landscape and are kept alive in language, sacred songs, stories and dance. 

September is regarded as the ‘most heavenly month of the dry season’. This year though, it’s the hottest and driest on record and the midday heat is searing. We’ll need to set out each day at first light, walk slowly and cherish water.

The early morning light is luminous. The dusk-sky, a dance of 50,000 little red flying-foxes; the dawn ferry crossing full of anticipation. We scramble swiftly up the north bank of the Katherine River, wary of saltwater crocodiles, and find the first of the Jatbula Trail’s blue triangular markers.

Walking in the shadow of the escarpment, winding through softly lit savannah woodlands to Northern Rockhole with its sheer cliff face black with algae and green with remnant ferns and mosses, waiting for the rain to come and the water to cascade. It’s a gentle, meandering walk up to the top of the escarpment with views across Seventeen Mile Valley, its dark rocky outcrops and paperbark fringed creek. We arrive at the first night’s campsite at mid-morning and spend the warm, slow afternoon in the pools of Biddlecombe Cascades. Banksias, salt palms and rock figs offer shade; blue-faced honeyeaters, diamond doves and white cockatoos provide the soundtrack. The swamp glistening with crimson sundews. A colony of green ants folding and ‘gluing’ leaves together to form a cocoon.

A rare coolness in the breeze during the night. A meandering trail through stone country, the early morning air humid and the cloud cover holding. Salmon gums, scarlet gums and bloodwoods. Herons lifting up gracefully from waterholes. Jawoyn ochre paintings on a sheltered, rock wall. A flock of red-tailed black cockatoos, magnificent in their showiness. Pale grey cone-shaped termite mounds. A whirr of crested pigeons as a bird of prey circles low overhead. The country ‘cleaned up’ with fire. The air smokey from centuries of burning. New growth appearing on the blackened vegetation. Birds nests high up in the branches of now-dead trees. At Crystal Falls, the lull of water falling over rocks. Lilac, mauve and white water lilies, their reflection a delicate drawing on the water. Bright red dragonflies skimming over the pool, eels swimming in its depths. The distant growl of a plane, the only reminder of life beyond this idyll of languid afternoons in and out of rockpools; the air warm, the water warm, a water monitor lazy on a log suspended above the pool. 

A smattering of rain, strange in its unexpectedness. A view back to Crystal Falls with water cascading from a dizzying height to the pools below. Walking across the plateau through stone country, then savannah country with an understorey of spinifex and grasses, some of them dusky pink in the morning sun. The speargrass bent double by the knock-em-down winds that come at the end of the wet season. Young, bright green, fern-leaved grevillea, beautiful salmon gums and thick-trunked bloodwoods with garnets of resin at their base. Swathes of wattle and deciduous red-flowering kurrajongs. Termite mounds like monumental Henry Moore sculptures. We enter an amphitheatre, a desert oasis of lush green monsoon forest, clouds of butterflies and Jawoyn rock art. Emus, a horse, stencilled hands, Jawoyn men and a Jawoyn woman, a spirit figure who is believed to seductively entice young men to their doom.

On across the top of the escarpment in the gathering heat to the top of Seventeen Mile Falls. The crevices in the rock face sheltering yellow sun bladderworts. Electric blue and red dragonflies skimming the water. The emerald green pool way down at the base of Seventeen Mile Falls is a sacred site and possibly a haven for crocodiles (unless that’s a story the rangers tell to keep walkers at a respectful distance).

The dusk vibrates with cicadas and microbats, a glittering crescent moon hangs in the night sky. The dawn, a tremolo of northern blue-winged kookaburras. As we meander across the escarpment, the ground changes colour from pale yellow to red to grey and black. Handsome, white-limbed grevilleas and paperbarks, a canopy of green. The warm air heady with frankincense and sandalwood. Walking across floodplains and speargrass country until we reach the Edith River and start the journey downstream along its riverine corridor. The sound of water falling and, at Sandy Camp, a beautiful pool fringed with paperbarks, swamp banksias and pandanus. Small, sandy beaches to laze on and watch shimmering rainbow bee-eaters catch dragonflies on the wing.

The waterhole is alive with activity in the depths of the night. Just before dawn, the world quietens and the glittering stars reflect as diamonds on the still waters of the pool. Mauve fringe lilies, jewel beetles, grasslands rustling with rainbow skinks and lizards. The ground orange with fallen pandanus fruit. Kapok trees, bright yellow with flowers. An indication that it’s the time of year when crocodiles and turtles are carrying eggs. The Edith River, always close by. Slabs of stone holding the waves of the long-vanished inland sea. A stop at Sweetwater Pool for a swim before the walk’s last stretch. Yellow sunflakes flowering in the shallow water at the edge of the pool. The water otherwise deep and cooling.

Stone country, rough underfoot and hot as the morning lengthens. A whistling kite on the hunt. The upper pool from where we look out across the bone-dry escarpment, the horizon broken with a range of dark pink hills, the only greenness the trace of a creek and a narrow trail of monsoon rainforest. The Edith River now a series of cascades, a symphony of water falling and pooling, the upper pool, the middle pool and the lower pool.

Sitting on the shady verandah of the Leliyn kiosk at walk’s end, we reflect on our journey following a songline through Jawoyn country. An alluring walk from one beautiful waterhole to the next, along the high sandstone escarpment and through grassy woodlands, shady monsoon forests and riverine landscapes given birth to in Burr, the time of the Dreaming. We resolve to return to see this beguiling country in another season, just after the wet, when the country is transformed by water and its ancestral spirits revived.