Trekking and camping in the Red Centre, Northern Territory

What Australians call the Red Centre is both a rusty wilderness, slap-bang in the middle of the country – and much else besides. Not least in colour: the dirty green of scrub that survives on 30 days rainfall a year, the unbroken blue of an outback day, the purple of the southern hemisphere night.

Still, red dominates, especially in its landmarks: Uluru, the world’s largest natural monolith, sister formation Kata Tjuta, and nearby Kings Canyon. Sacred Indigenous Australian sites all, hard won back by the Anangu people from the Australian government in 1985.

Departing from Alice Springs, the Rock Tour visits all three in as many days. A 5am start and four-hour mini-bus drive drops us at the cultural centre inside the Uluru-Kata Tujta national park. Co-designed by architects with the Pitjantjatjara community to share their Dreamtime origin stories and Tjukurpa (natural law), its lively but respectful displays make sense of the Anangu’s request (ignored by many tourists) not to climb Uluru.

Instead, we do a three-hour walk around its base, stopping at cave drawings and waterholes to learn more from our guide, Adam. The only part of the adjacent Ayers Rock resort we visit is the campsite where, after a simple supper, we snuggle into our swags – a sleeping bag and mattress in one. They’re easy to roll up again at 4.30am, when we are woken to catch the sunrise over coffee and toast served from the minibus.

Next stop, Kata Tjuta, 25km to the west, whose Dreamtime stories are so sacred to male elders that they can’t be shared on our walk through its 36 marble-like domes. Rather, we get a geology lesson that’s drawn in the sand and try such bushtucker as fragrant wild mint, as we drink in vistas worthy of Jurassic Park.

Then it’s time to drive to Mount Ebenezer bush station to set up camp, cook beer bread over the open flames, and sleep once more under the stars. Day three brings our earliest start and toughest trek yet – up, down and around the spectacular 100m gorge at Kings Canyon and its oasis of pools and plant-life nicknamed the Garden of Eden.

As we finish our final four-hour walk at a healthy 10am, Adam jokes: “You came all this way to see two rocks and a hole?” Well, yes. Plus 10,000 years of Indigenous culture, the natural wonders of a neoproterozoic age, and that eternal Northern Territory sky.
• The Rock Tour (therocktour.com.au) costs AU$375 (£194) for a three-day, two-night tour, including food and camping
Nancy Groves

Camping at Booderee national park, Jervis Bay, NSW

As you walk towards the dunes of Cave Beach, thick with vegetation and framed by the odd gum tree, thoughts of whether you brought too much equipment for the trek down to the campsite slowly fade away. Just three hours south of Sydney, Jervis Bay is an enclave that belongs to the Commonwealth of Australia – not the state of New South Wales – and beautiful Booderee is largely managed by the Dhurga people in the Indigenous Australian community of Wreck Bay.

The community has been the custodian of this stretch of coast for thousands of years, and it is the thoughts of who came before us that fill our minds as we explore the caves that give the beach its name. The Dhurga can take you on a guided tour of the area, teach weaving or spend time storytelling around the campfire, while the botanic garden is the only Indigenous Australian-owned one in the country.

Before dinner, my son and I see eastern grey kangaroos, swamp wallabies, lizards, frogs, and a handful of different parrots; at night, a mix of families and backpackers huddle around the cast-iron camp-stoves cooking halloumi, steak, and marshmallows. As we take in the dense Milky Way above, the sounds of the waves remind us why it’s a popular spot for surfers from nearby towns.
• Campsite fee AU$22 (around £11) in summer, including entry to the national park, parksaustralia.gov.au/boodere,+61 2 4443 0977. No hot water but electric barbecues mean you don’t have to make your own fire if you don’t feel like it
Bill Code

Touring the Quinkan galleries, Northern Queensland

Parts of northern Queensland’s ocre-and-red landscape are devoid of people but full of history. I’m here to see the Quinkan galleries, some of the oldest rock art in the world, estimated to date back 30,000 years.

The art is found across 230,000 hectares of sandstone in central Queensland, four hours’ drive inland from Cairns. The most accessible of it is around 30 minutes’ drive from the small town of Laura, an open, sun-baked area of craggy escarpments, one that requires a hat, sunscreen and water once you venture from your vehicle’s air conditioning.

It is on the underbelly of large rock formations that the art is displayed, some of it requiring you to peer into caves but most set out on flat, exposed rock at ground level. Wooden guardrails are in place to ensure the art isn’t damaged, but you can still get close to these depictions by following a trail up a moderately steep path.

Guided tours are available, with walks taking between 15 minutes and three hours, from the nearby town of Laura. I paid the AU$5 (£2.60) honesty fee and scrambled up the rocky path myself. To the Indigenous Australian people, the Quinkans are protective spirit guides. They are depicted as spindly figures with outstretched arms, and large and owl-like eyes. Emus, ibis and various trees are also visible. The art – combined with the rocks and burnt colours, save for the flashes of sparse but vivid gum trees and grasses after the rain comes – chimes perfectly with the landscape.
• Guided tours, arranged through the Quinkan and Regional Cultural Centre in Laura, cost from AU$100 to AU$160pp (£52-83). For information on rock art tours, +61 7 40603457, quinkancc.com.au
Oliver Milman

Shark Bay kayak tour, Western Australia

“You hungry, brother?” asks Darren “Capes” Capewell, midway through our kayaking tour of Shark Bay. With that he duck-dives off his kayak and emerges with a fiesty-looking crab to cook up for our lunch on a twig-fire on the beach.

At the western extremity of the Australian mainland, Shark Bay is one of the few places on earth to hold Unesco world heritage status for all four natural criteria, designated for its outstanding beauty, dynamic ecology, biological diversity and for its contribution to our understanding of evolution.

Five hundred miles north of Perth, the bay is one of Australia’s most striking coastal areas, where the red desert meets the turquoise Indian Ocean, and has a profound cultural history, the Malgana, Nhanda and Inggarda people having lived here for 25,000 years.

Capewell’s kayak tour not only ensures a connection with the landscape his people have inhabited for so long but also takes visitors beyond the region’s crowd-pleasing dolphin sites. It skirts the shore at Monkey Mia, providing a different experience of this five million-acre natural wonder, where there are frequent sightings of dugong (a type of sea-cow), turtles and other marine life.
• Wula Guda Nyinda (wulaguda.com.au) has half-day kayak and snorkel tours of Shark Bay cost AU$140 (£72) adults and AU$90 (£47) kids
Daniel Scott

Budj Bim tours of Lake Condah, Victoria

Although the ruins of the eel-farming operation that existed at Lake Condah, near Heywood in western Victoria, don’t have the aura of Uluru, their existence makes them nearly as important as the famous red rock.

Here, the Gunditjmara people developed one of the most sophisticated aquaculture systems on the planet; living alongside it in stone huts from at least 6,700 years ago, according to archeologists. This not only gives the lie to the belief that all Indigenous Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers but also makes this Australia’s oldest-known settlement.

“The lake was like a giant pantry,” Gunditjmara guide Ben Church tells me, as we walk among the ruins on a Budj Bim tour, “and the eels were traded right across southern Australia.”

With their population peaking at up to 10,000, Church’s ancestors lived well here until the early 19th century, when colonists forced them off their land and into the Lake Condah mission. Here they were forbidden from speaking their language or practising traditional skills, such as weaving eel baskets. The story of the settlement was also suppressed, until its existence was proven by archaeologist Heather Builth, just under 20 years ago.

Visiting this rubbly wetland with Church and Debbie Malseed, a Gunditjmara elder, I experience a sense of the thriving community that existed here and of disbelief that this part of Australia’s history isn’t better known.
• Budj Bim tours of Lake Condah cost from AU$50 (£26) for adults, +613 5527 1699, budjbim.com
DS

Homestay, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory

One of the most extraordinary trips I’ve taken is to east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, where I spent a week learning how to weave baskets with the traditional owners of the land.

Eleven hours’ drive from Darwin and accessible only by four-wheel drive, visitors (who usually come as part of a group) bring their own camping equipment and food, and spend a week or more living on homelands with the Indigenous community – who number around 100.

My days are spent collecting panadanas leaves from bushland, drying them out in the sun, then sitting under a shade cloth with the women of the community and weaving the dried leaves into extraordinary, colourful baskets. The weaving workshops are led by elderly women who have lived in Mäpuru all their lives.

It isn’t all craft. Each day the children of the community and I go swimming in the waterhole (the kids keep an eye out for crocodiles) and I’m also lucky enough to accompany the women on a hunting trip; we go to the plains and shoot buffalo, which we cook up at night on the campfire in a stew.

The Yolngu culture is one of the world’s longest continuing Indigenous cultures, and is largely intact and thriving in east Arnhem Land. English is spoken but most people in Mäpuru communicate in Yolngu languages. To me, no place feels as strange, beautiful and foreign as this corner of Australia where life and time moves at a different pace.
• A group trip with Ceres (ceres.org.au) costs from AU$2,000 (£1,034) for nine days
Brigid Delaney

Sail Darwin Tiwi Islands Tour, Northern Territory

“I grew up visiting these islands, fishing and hunting with my Dad,” guide Shannon Lee tells us as we sail to the Tiwis, around 50 miles north of Darwin. Lee, 26, is from the coastal Larrakia people, around Darwin, and accompanies us throughout a four-day tour, sharing his culture and introducing us to Tiwi people he has known since childhood.

After spending our first evening watching flatback turtles laying eggs on a remote sand cay, we anchor in the lake-like Apsley Strait between the Tiwis’ two inhabited islands, Bathurst and Melville, where 90% of the 3,000 population are Tiwi.

“We’ve been here at least 7,000 years,” says Tiwi elder Molly Munkara, who we meet, with three other local women, painting mussel shells under a wild apple tree on Bathurst Island, on our second morning.

The Tiwis have a distinct culture and language, different from any on the mainland, and have been meeting outsiders, including Indonesian trepangers who came in search of sea cucumber, for more than five centuries. They’re also gifted artists, in a range of styles including textile design, ironwood carving and bark painting.

This unhurried tour allows us to spend time with artists such as the acclaimed 84-year-old Connie Tipuamantumirri and potter Regis Pangiraminni, buy work straight from its creators and meet some of the island’s transgender “sistagirls”, long an accepted part of the Tiwi community.

On either side of going ashore, we fish for snapper and trevally as the tropical sun rises and sets in a blaze of tangerine and lilac hues and hear more about our Larrakia guide’s upbringing over galley-cooked meals on board Sail Darwin’s 50ft catamaran.
• Sail Darwin’s (saildarwin.com.au) three-day, three-night Tiwi islands Adventure Sail costs AU$1,485 (£767) including all meals and accommodation
DS

Top Didj Cultural Experience Tours, Katherine, Northern Territory

It is only a rubber wristband but putting it on feels significant, emblazoned as it is with the name “Dalabon”, artist Manuel Pamkal’s family group from Arnhem Land.

“Today, you are part of my family,” 51-year-old Pamkal tells us as we don the wristbands at the start of the Top Didj cultural experience, in Katherine, three hours’ drive south of Darwin.

He goes on to detail his life, including how his father taught him bark painting using natural colours such as ochre and white clay, and to talk of his people’s connection to “country” and their traditional belief systems.

Then, led by Pamkal and working from a template, a visiting French family and I get stuck into some simple rark, or cross-hatch, painting, a style emanating from Arnhem Land. Using fine (jalk) brushes made from reeds, we each eventually create a turtle “artwork” which we take away as a souvenir.

It is inspiring to do something so hands-on but we also emerge with a greater appreciation for the Dalabon and their careful husbandry of the land over thousands of years, thanks to this gentle commentary provided by this passionate ambassador of his people.

The award-winning cultural experience ends with a chance to learn fire-lighting skills, with only grass and two types of wood, and to throw a spear using a woomera – a wooden lever that accelerates the weapon’s speed – at cardboard kangaroos.
• Top Didj’s Cultural Experience (topdidj.com) costs AU$70 (£36) for adults and AU$45 (£23) for kids (3-15). Sessions run from 9.30am and 2.30pm every day, May to October
DS