Mataranka

I drove into Mataranka expecting a fuel stop and a sandwich, and left three hours later than planned because of a swimming hole. That’s the entire pitch for this town, four hours south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway, and it turns out to be more than enough. The Rainbow Springs pool at Elsey National Park pumps out around 30.5 million litres of crystal-clear water a day at a constant 34 degrees, filtered up through limestone from an aquifer that’s been running for longer than anyone can usefully date. I got in expecting a nice warm bath and got something closer to floating in liquid glass — I could see my own feet on the sandy bottom three metres down, small fish moving around my ankles, and a canopy of livistona palms overhead filtering the light into moving patterns on the water.

The pool sits inside a genuine patch of tropical palm forest, an odd, lush pocket dropped into the middle of dry savanna country, which is its own small miracle of hydrology. I did three separate loops of the fifteen-minute path connecting the main pool to Bitter Springs a few kilometres away, floating downstream with the current at Bitter Springs on my back like the world’s laziest lazy river, watching paperbarks slide past overhead.

The area carries real history beyond the swimming. The nearby Elsey Homestead ruins and cemetery mark the setting of Jeannie Gunn’s “We of the Never Never,” a 1908 memoir that’s still on Australian school reading lists, and the region remains Yangman and Mangarrayi country, with a working cattle-station history that predates the tourist infrastructure by more than a century. I stopped at the roadhouse for a beer and ended up talking to a station hand for forty-five minutes about mustering cattle by helicopter, which was not the conversation I expected to have at a highway servo.

When to go: Year-round, since the springs stay at a constant temperature regardless of season, though the dry season from May to October is more comfortable for the drive and camping. Get to Rainbow Springs before 9 a.m. to have the pool mostly to yourself before the tour buses arrive.