Gregory's Tree

This boab carries two dates cut into its bark: 13 October 1855 and 2 July 1856, the arrival and the departure of Augustus Charles Gregory's North Australia Expedition, which made its entrenchment camp beside the Victoria River here. The carvings are still readable. The expedition's botanist was Ferdinand von Mueller, who became one of the most consequential botanists in Australian history, and who named the Australian boab Adansonia gregorii after the man leading the party. So the tree belongs to a species named for the expedition that carved it. That is a rarer credential than any age figure. Nobody has published an age for it, and boabs are notoriously hard to date. The Northern Territory Heritage Register, which permanently declared the place in 1995, settles for calling it a living monument to the exploration of northern Australia. It is also Ngalibinggag, a registered sacred site of the Ngaringman people, and the reserve is built around that: a boardwalk and interpretive panels ring the tree so that visitors keep off the ground at its base and do not touch the trunk. Looking is the whole visit, and nothing about the looking is restricted. The reserve sits on the Victoria Highway about fifteen kilometres north-west of Timber Creek, three and a half hours' drive west of Katherine, with no public transport of any kind. Come in the dry.