Kakadu National Park
— — the country that keeps six seasons instead of four.
Not only on a wall.
“Almost twenty thousand square kilometres of floodplain, escarpment, and monsoon forest in Australia's Northern Territory. The Bininj and Mungguy people have read this country for tens of thousands of years; the rock galleries at Ubirr still carry the figures. In the late dry, the billabongs draw down and the birds come in by the thousand. Saltwater crocodiles hold the shallows.
Kakadu National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kakadu covers roughly 19,800 square kilometres of the Alligator Rivers region in Australia's Northern Territory, about 150 kilometres east of Darwin. It is jointly managed by its Bininj and Mungguy traditional owners and Parks Australia, and has held dual World Heritage status for both natural and cultural values since 1981. The country runs from the sandstone Arnhem Land escarpment down through stone country, lowland woodland, and the great seasonal floodplains of the South and East Alligator Rivers, ending in tidal mangrove flats on Van Diemen Gulf.
The Bininj calendar reads the year in six seasons, not four: Gudjewg, Banggerreng, Yegge, Wurrgeng, Gurrung, and Gunumeleng. Each shifts the country. Gudjewg is the monsoon proper, with thunderstorms walking the floodplains from January into March. By Wurrgeng in June the air is cool and dry and the billabongs concentrate; by Gurrung in late September the country is hot and waiting for the build-up storms of Gunumeleng to return.
Some of the oldest continuous rock art in the world is held in Kakadu's sandstone galleries. The painted shelters at Ubirr and Burrungkuy (Nourlangie) carry layered images of barramundi, long-necked turtle, Mimi spirits, and Namarrgon the Lightning Man, with the earliest figures dated to well over 20,000 years. The escarpment itself is older still: Proterozoic sandstone laid down roughly 1.7 billion years ago, weathered into the outliers that hold the galleries today.