What is the significance of Kakadu National Park?

Kakadu National Park is a 19,804-square-kilometre protected area in the Top End of the Northern Territory, 200 kilometres east of Darwin. It is jointly managed by the traditional Bininj and Mungguy owners and Parks Australia and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in stages between 1981 and 1992 for both natural and cultural values.

Kakadu contains some of the world's oldest and most extensive Aboriginal rock-art galleries. Sites at Ubirr, Nourlangie (now Burrungkuy), and Nanguluwur preserve more than 5,000 paintings, with the oldest dated to between 20,000 and 40,000 years before present. The paintings record extinct megafauna, the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), the contact period with Europeans, and ceremonial figures including the lightning man Namarrkon and the ancestral being Ginga the saltwater crocodile.

Ecologically the park covers six major landforms: the stone country of the Arnhem Land escarpment, the lowlands of woodland and forest, the southern hills and ridges, the floodplains and billabongs of the South Alligator River, the coastal mangroves, and the tidal flats. About 2,000 plant species, 280 bird species (more than one third of all birds recorded in Australia), 60 mammal species, and 117 reptile species live within the park, including saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, magpie geese, and the endangered northern quoll.

Kakadu's joint management was established under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Traditional owners hold the majority of seats on the park's board of management, and the park's name itself comes from the Gagudju language. Visitor numbers peaked at about 240,000 a year in the late 1990s and have since declined to about 200,000, with the dry season (May to October) the most popular time to visit. The 1986 film Crocodile Dundee, partly filmed at Kakadu, dramatically raised the park's international profile and continues to drive tourist interest decades later.