Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 7: Maguk
Maguk, in Kakadu, is a favourite place.
Actually — no. Kakadu is our favourite place. The whole of it. Let me not undersell this.
You camp at the Yellow Water billabong, and you do not miss the boat tours — not there, and not on the Alligator River, where the crocodiles are and are not shy about it. You go and watch the tourists at Cahill’s Crossing play chicken with the tide, driving across a flooded causeway over a river famous for its crocodiles, on the cheerful assumption that they’ll make it to the far side, which most of them do. And at the end of the day you take yourself to Ubirr for the sunset, which is one of the great sunsets of the earth, the floodplain going gold and then red and then dark all the way to the horizon while the rock art watches behind you.
But the best of it — the very best — is swimming at Maguk.
Maguk is a huge waterhole with a waterfall dropping straight down into it off the escarpment. You park at a little carpark up a dirt track a few kilometres off the Kakadu Highway, and then you walk in — twenty minutes, through croc country, and then across the rocks of the creek itself — and then you go straight into the magic water. And it is magic. It runs warmer than you’d expect, because the rock at the bottom is black and holds the heat, and you swim out across it to the waterfall and put your head directly under the place where it lands and let it pound the thoughts clean out of your skull.
Amazing.
This, really, is the entire formula for the Northern Territory. Park somewhere. Walk a bit. Swim in an astonishing place. That’s it. That’s the Territory.
Well. Almost all of them. There’s also Uluru. Nowhere to swim at Uluru. You can’t have everything.
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