Discover Point Stuart

Point Stuart combines fishing tours with wildlife watching on the water and a range of safari experiences. You can tailor your trip to whether you mainly want to fish, explore the Mary River Wetlands by boat, or get to know the landscapes on foot and by 4WD. The experiences differ not only in theme but also in how you get around.

Fishing and wildlife watching on the water

Point Stuart Wilderness Lodge is a licensed fishing tour operator in the Northern Territory. Barramundi fishing safaris can be tailored to casting, trolling or fly fishing. This puts different fishing techniques at the heart of the experience—a useful distinction if you want to plan your trip around the type of fishing.

The Mary River Wetlands Cruise offers a different perspective. It departs from Rockhole on the 24-seat boats “Azure I” and “Azure II”. The cruise offers opportunities to spot saltwater and freshwater crocodiles; trained guides with knowledge of local flora and fauna accompany the tour. Compared with a fishing safari, the focus here is on the boat trip through the wetlands and observing their wildlife and plant life.

Explore on foot or on safari

Birding & Wildlife Tours are specialized wildlife safaris in the heart of the Mary River Wetlands. The tours include day and night walks. Both air-conditioned 4WD vehicles and open off-road vehicles are used. When planning, you can therefore distinguish between a guided vehicle safari and walks at different times of day, without reducing the tours to just one kind of nature watching.

The 4WD Safari Tour also has its own landscape focus: it passes permanent billabongs, rainforest edges, grassland and paperbark forests, and departs from Point Stuart Wilderness Lodge. The succession of these landscape features can be compared with the character of the Jimmy Creek Monsoon Forest Walk. This walk follows a constructed path and boardwalk through dense, cool, shady undergrowth in a tropical monsoon vine forest. Here, the focus is not on driving through different landscapes but on walking through a stretch of closed forest.

Visitor information

A public car park provides direct access and day-use access to Mary River National Park and the Jimmy Creek Monsoon Forest Walk. As operational details can change, check the latest information before your visit. For trip planning, it is worth distinguishing between the specific experiences: the cruise is a boat trip departing from Rockhole, the wildlife safaris combine vehicle tours with day and night walks, and the 4WD Safari passes through several types of landscape.

The Northern Territory in context

Point Stuart is part of the broader Northern Territory destination. Its parks and reserves range in landscape from the arid Red Centre to the tropical Top End; altogether, there are more than 80 parks and reserves covering over 50,000 square kilometres. This regional scope is a separate point of reference for planning a trip in the Northern Territory, not a description of the immediate surroundings of Point Stuart.

Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory is one example of the wider destination’s diversity. It brings together cultural and natural World Heritage values with wetlands of international importance. There are about 5,000 recorded Aboriginal rock art sites there. If you are interested in the landscapes and nature experiences around Point Stuart, this regional perspective can provide additional context for the Northern Territory without conflating the different places.

Discover more destinations

Discover more destinations: Larrakeyah, Jabiru, Ayers Rock, Darwin, Alyangula, Stuart Park, Driver, Mt Zeil

Go to the broader travel overview: Northern Territory.