Kakadu National Park

Aboriginal people have lived in Kakadu for more than 40,000 years, leaving galleries of rock paintings that layer prehistory into living memory. The park sweeps from sandstone plateau and escarpment down across floodplains and tidal flats patrolled by saltwater crocodiles and thronged with birdlife, a chain of ecosystems rare to find intact. UNESCO listed Kakadu as a Mixed World Heritage Site in 1981, honouring nature and culture in equal measure, and later enlarged it.