Bamurru Plains

Northern Territory

We are flying east from Darwin. The millennia of ebbing and teeming waters have created a kind of leftover dinner plate where the sauces all run together: spinaches and coppers, taupes and cobalts.

We land at a rural Aussie airstrip and climb into a Land Cruiser, tough and sun-burnished as a rhino. The driver’s seat is a work of art: shredded leather, dust-encrusted steering wheel, peeling fabric and battered side panels. You’ve seen better looking interiors on the scrap heaps. But it’s a Land Cruiser: it’ll go on forever.

This is not fancy resort time. We arrive at a converted woolshed, and this honest aesthetic goes throughout. The rooms stand on stilts with wooden verandas. They have tin roofs and fly screens.

We’ve been in chic, urbanised Australian country and wandered the ancient Aboriginal heartland. Now we are in pioneer land.

True, there’s a nice swimming pool with elegant chairs, big cushions and shade. It overlooks a floodplain: tufty, rough grass is littered with wallaby poo, termite mounds and desiccated palm fronds. A herd of buffalo fossick in patches of grass. This is the nursery. Dads and mums are resting knee-deep in the cool distant water, trying not to worry about crocodiles. They wander in at dusk. And if you want to see a happy water buffalo, watch them having a good bum scratch on a termite mound. They also love ploughing through a clump of turkey bushes: the flowers are natural antihistamines. They work on mosquito bites.