Tomb Raiders – Nourlangie NT

Photo Credit Parks Australia

Nourlangie Bluff (Burrungkuy Rock) is a must visit while in Kakadu. Take a walk through shaded rock shelters and marvel at the now World Heritage-listed rock art and get a taste of how life was for the Bininj people. Their artworks include hand stencils, food sources like fish and turtle and a prime example of ‘Contact Art’ that clearly shows a painting of a two-masted sailing ship (lugger).

Looking South to Nourlangie Bluff, aerial photo Murray Upton 1971

Looking North to Nourlangie Bluff, photo Murray Upton 1971

With fantastic camp areas to chose from, visitors can fish for Barra, explore billabongs, rock pools and lookouts or just relax in the magnificent surrounds of this Arnhem Land escarpment. The area boasts hundreds of species of wildlife and is a mecca for bird watchers and croc spotters.

HEMA Maps have provided all the good info on where to stop, watch and camp. Using HEMA Paper, App or GPS Maps you’ll know where you are and where you are going. DO NOT rely on a standard GPS.

‘Shameful’ Past

The area is home to many sacred burial sites which have now unfortunately, largely been desecrated.

Like so many Aboriginal communities, ancestral remains and artefacts were ‘officially stolen’ up until the 1960s from the Nourlangie and Muirella areas. With many remains collected and stored in overseas museum for out-dated research, some 'souvenir skulls’ were even used as sugar bowls. The head of research at the National Museum of Australia, Dr Michael Pickering said "We know of at least 600 held in British institutions, and we also know that there are collections in France, Germany, Poland and probably in Russia." Since the mid-1980s, the National Museum's repatriation program has returned the remains of more than 1,100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and more than 350 secret-sacred objects. It took a decade of negotiations to repatriate many from the Smithsonian Institute acquired for ‘research’ in a major expedition in 1948. However, remarkably, not one research paper has been written. The National Museum of Victoria has also returned many skeletons which it received in separate batches from Arnhem Land in 1913 and 1918. The National Museum of Australia still holds, in its Mitchell ACT warehouse, hundreds of Aboriginal Skeletons and artefacts either unable to be identified or still awaiting identification and repatriation to their place of origin.

More recently, souvenir hunters have been removing remains from sacred sites across Arnhem Land. In 1971 Murray Upton found numerous burial sites including this one near Nourlangie, only to find them pilfered when he later returned in 1974. Indeed a shameful blight on the preservation and respect of historic and sacred sites and artefacts.

So when in the bush please don’t touch!

‘Don’t destroy what you came to enjoy’!