In the Land of the Dreamtime.

The article describes Australia's Kakadu National Park. I watch the ocher rays of a setting sun add meaty color to skeletal figures painted eons ago on a giant rock called Ubirr in Kakadu National Park, a primeval jumble of wetlands, cliffs and forests punctuated by huge boulders that bear some of the oldest and most impressive Aboriginal artworks known. At the bridge over the South Alligator River, signs warn travelers to beware the crocs that stalk its banks. Most of Kakadu's almost 20,000 square kilometers (nearly five million acres) are inaccessible by car--especially during the rainy summer months from November through April--and even the landscape near the roads seems virtually untouched by humanity. That is an illusion, ranger Alex Dudley points out the next afternoon as he guides a walking tour at the base of Nourlangie Rock. "This is not a wilderness," Dudley asserts. "This place has been home to people for 50,000 years." The local culture holds that Nayuhyunggi, the "first people," arrived in Kakadu during the Dreamtime, a creation period when supernatural beings emerged from deep in the earth. Some of these creation ancestors, Dudley explains, ended their journeys by transferring themselves onto rock walls, leaving impressions that perceptive artists enhanced with natural pigments. Out on a 300-meter-long catwalk over the Yellow Water Billabong, an excited gaggle of birdwatchers track a sea eagle circling overhead with a fish in its beak, with another eagle in hot pursuit.