The Katherine River has been slicing through Nitmiluk's Arnhem Land plateau for 23 million years, carving thirteen gorges into Proterozoic sandstone that predates complex life on Earth. The gorge system—known as Nitmiluk to the Jawoyn people, whose ancestors occupied these escarpments for at least 40,000 years—extends 12 kilometres from north to south, with vertical walls reaching 70 metres above the permanent waterway. The name translates to "cicada dreaming," a reference to the Jawoyn creation story tied to the gorge's formation. European contact came in 1862 when surveyor John McDouall Stuart traced the river's course, naming it after the daughter of one of his financial backers. The first tourist boats appeared in the 1960s, but the land was returned to Jawoyn custodianship in 1989 under the Nitmiluk National Park lease, which the traditional owners co-manage with the Northern Territory government. Nitmiluk National Park now receives over 300,000 visitors annually, most arriving on a katherine gorge day trip from darwin that departs before dawn to cover the 320-kilometre southbound journey along the Stuart Highway. The drive itself is a transect through Top End biogeography: Darwin's monsoon vine thickets give way to eucalypt savanna, then to the sandstone country where boab trees first appear. Edith Falls—a spring-fed cascade 42 kilometres north of the main gorge—has become a standard inclusion on full-day itineraries, offering a swim stop in a paperbark-lined plunge pool before the midday heat settles in. The gorge itself is navigable only by flat-bottomed boat during the Dry season, when water levels stabilise and saltwater crocodiles retreat downstream; freshwater crocodiles, by contrast, sun themselves on exposed sandbars year-round and are considered low-risk to humans. The gorge walls preserve a vertical record of tectonic uplift and erosion. Jindare sandstone—laid down 1.65 billion years ago—forms the pale orange ramparts visible from the water, banded with iron oxides and cross-bedded by ancient river systems that have long vanished. Jawoyn rock art sites cluster at the second and third gorges, where galleries of hand stencils, spirit figures, and x-ray fauna are shielded beneath overhangs. These panels are not publicly accessible without Jawoyn guides, a protocol enforced to protect the cultural continuity of the art's interpretation. The park's boat operators hold permits that limit the number of vessels allowed in each gorge section at any given hour, a cap introduced in 2003 to mitigate propeller erosion and noise impact on nesting white-bellied sea eagles. The result is a surprisingly quiet passage through the upper gorges, where the only sounds are the slap of water against stone and the calls of rainbow bee-eaters that nest in the sandy banks each spring.