Litchfield National Park

The corrugated iron sign at the park entrance says LITCHFIELD NATIONAL PARK in plain bureaucratic lettering, which does nothing to prepare you for what follows. I drove the 115 kilometres from Darwin on a Saturday morning, which put me at the magnetic termite mounds before 9 a.m. and ahead of the tour buses, which was the correct decision. The mounds stand in a grassy clearing — dozens of them, all oriented north-south to regulate temperature, all grey and fluted and up to two metres tall, all humming faintly with a hundred thousand invisible termites. Biologists call this construction “thermo-regulation.” I called it architecture and stood there for ten minutes deciding whether the comparison was reductive. I decided it was not.

The five main waterfalls of Litchfield — Wangi, Florence, Tolmer, Tjaynera, and Buley Rockhole — are fed by the same sandstone plateau, the Tabletop Range, which collects the monsoon rains and releases them through the dry season in diminishing but still substantial flows. I swam in four of them over two days. Each one is different: Florence Falls drops into a narrow gorge with sheer sandstone walls and a plunge pool of extraordinary green clarity; Buley Rockhole is a series of cascades over flat stone ledges, more like a natural slide than a waterfall; Wangi Falls, the largest and best known, has a wide pool ringed by monsoon forest and a constant roar from its twin cascades that you feel in your chest.

I timed my Wangi swim for seven in the morning, before the day-trip coaches arrived from Darwin. The pool at that hour had three people in it — a family who had camped overnight — and the falls were catching the first direct sun, the water lit white against the dark wet rock behind it. The monsoon forest around the pool edge was dripping from the night’s humidity, the fig trees enormous and dark, the fruit bats leaving their roosts in ones and twos overhead. I floated on my back and watched them cross the sky and thought about how little time it had taken to get here from a city of 100,000 people. Litchfield is one of the most accessible wilderness experiences I have had.

The magnetic termite mounds, which are found only in the seasonally flooded black soil plains around the park, continue to strike me as one of the most discreetly spectacular things I have seen in Australia. They are built flat like gravestones — north-facing on the narrow edge, south-facing on the broad face — to catch morning and afternoon sun for warmth while avoiding the full midday heat. This is passive solar architecture that termites figured out long before humans tried. The mounds are centuries old. Some have been dated to over 50 years, and the structures are still expanding.

The camping at Litchfield — at Wangi and Florence both — is a genuinely good option. I spent one night at the Florence Falls campsite and lay awake for a while listening to the waterfall, which carries over several hundred metres of bush. The Southern Cross was directly overhead through a gap in the trees. The morning brought a kingfisher on the handrail outside my tent and a night heron working the pool below the cascade with a professional focus. Litchfield does not have the cultural weight of Kakadu or the sacred gravity of Uluru, and this is actually a reason to come — it is simply beautiful, and sometimes that is enough.

When to go: The dry season, May through October, is when all falls are accessible by conventional vehicle and the swimming holes are at their best. Some falls, particularly Tjaynera (Sandy Creek), require four-wheel drive access even in the dry season. The wet season closes parts of the park to vehicles but the falls are at full power — dramatic but harder to safely visit. June and July are the most comfortable and least crowded months.