Gregory National Park
"I drove for three hours inside the park and passed exactly one other vehicle, going the other way, who waved like we were old friends."
A vast, rugged Victoria River park of boab trees and sandstone gorges where 4WD tracks outnumber sealed roads and crowds are nonexistent.
Gregory National Park, known to its traditional owners as Judbarra, is the Territory’s second-largest park and one of its least visited, which sounds like a marketing failure until you’re standing inside it and realise it’s the entire point. The park straddles the Victoria River roughly between Timber Creek and Katherine, a rugged spread of sandstone escarpments, boab-studded plains, and gorge country that most itineraries skip entirely because it demands a proper 4WD and a willingness to see almost nobody else the whole day.
The boab trees are the first thing that throws you. They’re common across the Kimberley in Western Australia but rare this far east, and Gregory National Park sits right at the edge of their range — squat, bulbous, absurdly proportioned trees that look like something drawn by a child who’d only had boabs described to them verbally. I stopped the car repeatedly just to look at particularly outlandish specimens, one of which had a girth that would have taken six people holding hands to circle.
The Bullita Homestead area preserves the remains of a cattle station that operated here for nearly a century, and the ranger-led talks about droving cattle through this country before the highway existed put the isolation in real perspective — mustering here meant weeks alone with horses and dogs in some of the harshest gorge country in Australia. From Bullita, a 4WD-only loop track winds through limestone karst formations and past boab-lined creek beds that took me the better part of a day to drive properly, stopping constantly for photographs that never quite captured how enormous the scale of it all felt in person.
There’s genuinely nowhere to buy anything inside the park, no phone signal for most of it, and the Escarpment walk to a lookout over the Victoria River gorge delivers a view that, on the afternoon I did it, I had entirely to myself for over an hour.
When to go: May through October only — many tracks close completely in the wet season and even in the dry, high-clearance 4WD is mandatory beyond the main road. Carry more water and fuel than feels necessary; the nearest fuel is Timber Creek or Victoria River Roadhouse.