Elsy National Park is a former cattle station and is famous as the setting to the book “We of the Never Never” and the film location based on the book.

There is a natural thermal spring near the homestead that the World War 2 soldiers dammed to make a swimming hole for themselves, it is well maintained and popular and a constant 34C. We went in for a dip but it gets a little uncomfortable after a while, you expect a swim to be refreshing but this is like a warm bath.

Mataranka Thermal Springs

From there we went to Territory Manor for lunch, the attraction here was Barramundi feeding, they have a large pond in which they have 5 large barramundi that they have trained to feed on baits thrown into the water, (Barra normally will only feed on live bait). The biggest of these barramundi was apparently 1.5 mtrs but when we show up for their afternoon feed not one of them would poke their heads up from under the many water lilies on the pond.

From there we went to another thermal spring called Bitter Springs, this spring was a few degrees cooler than Mataranka and much more comfortable to swim in. The highlight here is that you let the current take you down the stream about 500 mtrs, get out and walk back. Unless you took footwear in the water with you the walk back was barefoot on gravel. Jacky wasn’t keen on the walk back and when I pointed out the many Golden Orb spiders sitting in their webs above the stream she was even less keen. I gave it a go and it was nice relaxing float/swim downstream, no spiders dropped out of their webs and the walk back wasn’t too bad.

We went back into Mataranka and did the tour of the Mataranka park where they had the characters from the book, it took about ten minutes mainly because I had instructions to photograph each character, then Jacky spotted the sign for the old Elsy Station Cemetery, so we headed off there to read the inscriptions of quite a few people who happen to call in at the station and die.