Jabiru

Jabiru lies in the country of the Mirarr, an Aboriginal clan group of western Arnhem Land, and rock shelters in the surrounding escarpment hold some of the oldest evidence of human occupation in Australia. The town itself is recent. Uranium was found at Ranger, a few kilometres away, in late 1969, and the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry of the 1970s, known as the Fox inquiry, recommended that mining begin at the site and that a service town be built. Kakadu was proclaimed in stages between 1979 and 1991; much of it is Aboriginal land, granted under Territory land-rights law and leased back to the Commonwealth to be run jointly with its traditional owners.

The town was laid out in the early 1980s to house Ranger's workforce and the park's staff, built around an artificial lake and named after the tall black-necked stork that Australians call the jabiru. For years only people working for the mine or the park could live there.

The Mirarr never agreed to mining. Their opposition became national news in 1998, when a blockade and an international campaign against a second mine at Jabiluka, led by the senior traditional owner Yvonne Margarula, stopped that project; surface works and a decline were built, but no mine.

Mining at Ranger finished in late 2012 and the plant processed stockpiled ore until January 2021, leaving a long rehabilitation of the site, for which the company holds access until January 2026. On 16 June 2021 the town was formally handed over to the Mirarr, and Jabiru is being rebuilt as a tourism and service town under Aboriginal ownership.

The Aboriginal people of Kakadu call themselves Bininj in the north of the park and Mungguy in the south, and several languages belong to the area, among them Kundjeyhmi, Kunwinjku and Jawoyn. English is the working language of the town. Aboriginal residents come from Jabiru itself, from outstations within the park and from Gunbalanya, across the East Alligator River in Arnhem Land.

Rock art is the region's great inheritance. The painted shelters near the town show fish, turtles and hunters, ancestral beings including the Rainbow Serpent, thin Mimih spirits, and, from the last two centuries, sailing ships and men with rifles. Some panels were repainted over thousands of years; others are closed to visitors as dangerous or sacred. Rangers and Bininj guides ask that people stay on the marked paths, touch nothing and carry no stone or plant away.

The local calendar has six seasons rather than two, running from the monsoon of Kudjewk through the cold, dry weeks of Wurrkeng to the hot weather of Kurrung, when the billabongs shrink and the storms build again. Each is read from what is flowering, what is fat and worth hunting, and when country should be burned; the smoke of deliberate burning is part of the dry-season air.

Kakadu is a working cultural landscape rather than a museum. Fire is still used to clean country, and the park's controlled burning is done in consultation with the traditional owners who have managed the land with it for thousands of years. Aboriginal art and culture are among the town's main industries alongside tourism, and the hotel built in the shape of a crocodile shows how closely the region is identified with the animal.

Roughly a thousand people live in Jabiru, a number that fell when the mine closed and that rises through the dry season with tour guides, contractors and seasonal park staff. About a quarter of residents are Aboriginal, and the town is also home to rangers, teachers, nurses, police and shopkeepers, many of them on postings of a few years.

The houses are low, louvred and raised, set in loops around the lake, and the public buildings — school, clinic, police station, pool, oval and shopping plaza — are all within walking distance. Work is in the national park and tourism, in the long rehabilitation of the Ranger site, and in schools, health services and local administration.

The year divides in two. From May to September the town is busy and the accommodation full; from December to March the visitors disappear, tracks close, the air grows heavy and the escarpment waterfalls come alive. Freight and groceries come up the highway from Darwin, three hours away, and prices reflect the distance; a specialist appointment or a big shop means the same drive.

The town's future is the main local subject: the shift from mining to tourism, the rebuilding of houses and public buildings under the Mirarr lease, and the question of what work will sustain a town of this size inside a national park.

Eating in Jabiru is a small-town affair. The supermarket in the plaza, a bakery, a service station and the bistros at the town's hotels cover most meals, and the lodge at Cooinda, about an hour's drive south-west, is the other place in this part of the park to buy a cooked dinner. Barramundi is the fish of the region, grilled or crumbed, and buffalo and crocodile turn up on menus as local curiosities.

The deeper food tradition is Bininj: the fish, turtles, waterbirds, yams and lily stems of the floodplain, hunted and gathered in season by people with the right to do so, guided by the same six-season calendar that governs burning and fishing. The Kakadu plum, a small green fruit very high in vitamin C, grows in the woodland around the town and is now harvested commercially by Aboriginal enterprises.

Mangoes come in before the build-up, and the wet season thins supplies when the highway is cut. Campers generally cook for themselves or bring food from Darwin, and the town's art centre and bakery are the places for coffee and cake. Alcohol is sold in limited quantities and in limited places across the park, and some nearby communities are dry by law.