The Katherine Reset

The clothes came out of the machine and still smelled dirty.

That would have been easy to blame on red dust, since red dust gets blamed for most things on this trip. But this was different. The clothes did not just look unwashed. They smelled exactly like they had spent half an hour being spun through water and handed straight back to us.

Steph checked the machine, then looked at me, puzzled. Neither of us could work out why.

That was Katherine, and Katherine was exactly the kind of place where a failed load of washing could matter more than a lookout. After the previous stretch, we were not chasing another spectacular camp. We wanted washing machines, a big shop, fuel, tyres, car parts, showers, a pool and a plan for East Arnhem Land, plus a few hours where nothing had to be packed away straight after we used it.

Before any of that, we still had to get out of Queensland.

Out of Lawn Hill

By the time we left, we had spent three nights at Lawn Hill and I still could not quite believe it. I would happily have stayed longer. The southern route out of the park remained closed by flooding, so we had to backtrack through Gregory and pick up the road south from there.

Gregory’s grocery store did not have much of what we needed, and its generator had broken. In a city, a broken generator is somebody else’s problem to fix within the hour. Out there, it can take out the whole shop for days. We bought two pies, more out of solidarity than any real plan.

While we waited, a few blokes flew in by helicopter, ordered coffee, had a chat and flew out again. A different world, out here in remote Australia.

I had assumed the road south to the highway would be sealed. It was not.

Most of it turned out to be dirt, though the drive itself was enjoyable, the country still open and remote even as we were, mentally, already halfway to the Territory. Camooweal was the target: fuel, tyre pressures, a free camp by the river and the first real step toward the Northern Territory.

Lunch was the two frozen pies.

We did not have a plan for cooking them beyond a pot on the induction cooker. So we let them sit, and sit, and sit. It took the better part of an hour before the pastry crisped up and the filling went from frozen to something you could call lunch. They tasted better than a pie steamed in a saucepan has any right to.

At Camooweal we refuelled, checked tyre pressures and found the free camp by the river already busy. It took a while to find a spot, but the place turned out nicer than expected, with plenty of grass and, against the odds, hardly any mosquitoes. We cooked dinner early anyway, on the assumption our luck with the bugs would not hold.

Into the Territory

We packed quickly the next morning, made coffee, and made our first stop the public toilets in Camooweal, since the free camp had no facilities of its own. Then came the border: the day we officially crossed into the Northern Territory.

Australia’s state and territory borders are usually low-key affairs. This one was too: a sign, a change in the speed limit and not much else. The Northern Territory had been a name on the map for months. Now it was where we actually were.

The speed limit here is 130 kilometres an hour, which sounded ambitious for a car carrying everything we own. We kept Roger closer to 110. It saves fuel and puts less strain on tyres, suspension and everything else that has already worked hard for us this year.

The road was long, straight and sealed all the way to Katherine: overtake a caravan, settle back in, watch a road train approach, both hands on the wheel before the wind hits, repeat.

We swapped drivers every hour or two. Dirt roads keep you present because the surface demands it. Sealed roads like this one do the opposite: nothing happens for long enough that your attention starts to drift. Other drivers helped a little. We worked through most of the outback greeting repertoire: one finger off the wheel, two fingers, a small raise of the hand, a full wave, even a tap on the head. It did not mean much, but on a road this quiet it counted as entertainment.

Barkly Homestead, with its enormous goanna out front, was the first break worth remembering. The roadhouse had apparently burned down not that long ago and been rebuilt from scratch: bar, restaurant, showers, fuel, none of the making-do you sometimes find at remote roadhouses. We had burgers there and carried on to Banka Banka Station.

After roughly five hours on the road, arriving at Banka Banka felt like being let off a conveyor belt. We had a good unpowered site, and in the camp kitchen we ended up talking with a Sydney couple who were paying one dollar a day for their rental car, on condition they returned it to a specific town by a specific date. Rental companies sometimes offer deals like that to get cars back to wherever the next tourist season needs them. It sounded appealing right up until you thought about actually making the deadline.

That evening we walked up to the lookout for sunset. It had been a long enough day that I found myself wishing for a couch, a television and a takeaway pizza. We had none of those, so we watched a movie on the phone instead and were in bed by seven.

The Pub at Daly Waters

From the sunset hill the evening before, we had guessed sunrise would be worth getting up for. It was. We made coffee and walked back up while the station was still quiet, watching the light come across the country.

Afterward we ran to the billabong and back, about four and a half kilometres. A little short as runs go, but it did the trick before another day of driving.

The most memorable stop of the day was the pub at Daly Waters. It is hard to describe without making it sound like it was designed that way, but nothing about it felt planned. Notes, signs, bras, flags, number plates, banknotes, stickers, hats and plenty we could not identify covered every surface and most of the ceiling. The campground was busy and the pub was busier, and somehow the whole place still made sense.

We ate there, the food was decent, and I could not resist a beer. We also ran into people from the previous night’s campsite and swapped the usual road stories: where you had come from, where you were headed, which roads were open, which campgrounds were worth booking again. An older guy played country songs, and it would have been easy to stay for the rest of the day.

But we had already paid for the next camp, so we kept moving. Elsey National Park, near Mataranka, was only about two and a half hours away, which by then felt practically around the corner.

The campground there was not the best national park campground we had stayed at, but it was perfectly fine. Temperatures were climbing again, and the crocodile warning signs reminded us we were back in that part of the country. We set up camp, checked out the boat ramp, cooked dinner and let the evening stay quiet.

Warm Water in Crocodile Country

The next morning started with a jungle-gym session, which loosened up legs that had spent two days folded into the driver’s seat.

Then we went to Mataranka Thermal Pool. It sits inside Elsey National Park, fed by springs that stay around 34 degrees year round, which sounds appealing until you remember the outside air was already above thirty by mid-morning. It was less swimming and more sitting in a very large, very warm bath. The setting was an odd mix too: crocodile warning signs on the approach in both directions, then, right at the spring itself, people floating around as if none of that applied here.

The water was not cooling us down, so after about fifteen minutes we got out and drove the short distance to Bitter Springs.

Bitter Springs suited us better. You wade in upstream, let the current carry you down through clear water for about a hundred metres, then climb out and walk back to do it again. It is less a pool and more a river you get to borrow for an afternoon.

After that we carried on to Katherine.

Katherine Reset

Katherine felt like an actual regional service town: supermarkets, workshops, government offices, traffic, locals and travellers passing through, rather than a resort strip or a roadhouse built around a fuel pump. Entering town, you could sense straight away that relations between white and Aboriginal communities here are complicated. Buying alcohol showed it most directly: our ID was checked twice and recorded, so purchase limits could not simply be avoided by walking into the next shop.

Our first stop was fuel, for the first time in weeks under two dollars a litre. Roger got a wash too. He looked dirty again within the hour, but at least some of the dust had been rearranged.

We stocked up on a few car items, including extra tyre valve cores and another air filter, then went to Woolies. It had that particular mix you get in a regional hub: locals doing an ordinary shop, campers pushing overloaded trolleys, workers in high-vis, and travellers like us working out how many days of food belonged in a cart before East Arnhem Land. Katherine is not somewhere I could live. I would miss the beach.

We stayed three nights at Discovery Parks Katherine. It was not cheap, but it was good, and after the previous stretch those three nights did a lot of quiet work: reading, messaging family, cooking without needing to pack anything away straight after, sitting by the pool, talking to the neighbours.

Nitmiluk in the Heat

We had a three-day Northern Territory parks pass, and Nitmiluk Gorge was only about thirty kilometres from town, so it was an easy decision to go. Most people still know it as Katherine Gorge, though Nitmiluk, the Jawoyn name, is what the national park goes by now. Recent flooding had closed off large sections, and a boat cruise would only have covered the lower gorge, so we chose a walk instead, one that would let us see more of it from above.

We should have started an hour earlier. The day heated up fast, the track climbed onto open escarpment with almost no shade, and there was nowhere to get out of the sun. We had water and lunch with us, which helped, though not with the temperature itself. Steph went red in the face. I was probably no cooler, just better at pretending.

The route linked parts of the Southern Walks, past Windolf, Pat’s Lookout and Jedda’s Rock, and came out at around twelve kilometres, mostly as a loop, which we will always choose over walking the same track twice. The cliffs opened out above the gorge, the river sat a long way below in places, and the sandstone had been carved into shapes that made the distance feel bigger than the number suggested.

Back in Katherine that evening, we did one more shop for Arnhem Land and started a load of washing.

The cycle finished. We hung everything up, and I said it still smelled dirty. Steph checked the machine, then went quiet for a second.

She had never put the detergent in.

We tried to start the wash again, but every machine was taken. Only two of the six were working. Staff told us the other four had been destroyed in the flood, and that back in March the whole campground had sat under more than a metre of water. Everything. Standing there with clean amenities around us and dry ground underfoot, it was hard to picture. Nothing but the missing machines, and the people who remembered it, gave any sign it had happened. The wash would have to wait until the next day, this time with detergent.

The Last Easy Day

Friday was for getting organised. We finally got through all the washing, detergent included this time. Steph pre-cooked several meals, we planned the next few weeks, spent time at the pool, talked to the neighbours, made bacon and egg sandwiches and had bolognese for dinner.

We also picked up the last few things for the road east: food, car parts, spare tyre valves, and four tyre-deflator pins that we grabbed almost as an afterthought.

East Arnhem Land was starting to feel close. Not just in distance, but in the permits, the restricted access and the long dirt road ahead. Katherine was the last place where an ordinary problem still had an ordinary fix. After this, there would not be a shop around the corner for a while.

We talked about doing parkrun on Saturday morning. Under normal circumstances that would have been an easy yes. Here it meant a chain of extra steps: run, shower, pack up, leave early enough, drive far enough, still have some energy left at the other end. The running itself was the easy part of that plan. We let it go.

That evening we had a beer and let ourselves enjoy the fact that, for one more night, none of it was our problem yet.