It’s a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Darwin to Finniss River Station, the 50,000-acre property home to the Northern Territory’s newest luxury retreat: Finniss River Lodge.
On the drive, my mum takes approximately 29 blurry photographs of the scenery from the passenger seat, sings along to ‘Redneck Woman’ three times before realising it is stuck on repeat and reminds me to slow down on every single corner. Classic mum!
We’re greeted at the station gate by Liam, the co-manager, who guides us down the corrugated red-dirt driveway to the five-star lodge set on the banks of a sweeping flood-plain. Mum takes 18 more photos on the ten-minute drive.
This might be Mum’s first time at a luxury retreat, but she belongs here. Her entire life has been leading up to this moment. Wearing her newly purchased R.M. Williams hat from Delaney’s Country and Western Store and an unshakeable smile, Mum is ready for a weekend of indulgence, adventure, and photo-opportunities to share with her 120 Facebook friends.
Here is a review of our stay, as told by quotes from my mum…
“What’s that pretty purple bush on the side of the driveway on our way in?” Mum asks our personal tour guide, local Territorian, and croc whisperer, Chase. It’s Turkey Bush and you can actually chuck branches of it in the fire to keep mosquitos away.
“I swear that’s an olive. It has to be an olive. Don’t you think that tastes like an olive?” she says about the pickled grapes (that taste uncannily like olives) on our cheese platter prepared by chef Travis.
“This is the most relaxed I’ve been in I don’t know how long… my whole life!” she says after the aforementioned cheese board and glass of Prosecco on arrival.
“It just looks like a postcard,” she exclaims, staring out of our suite window at the picture-perfect floodplain.
“I’ve always wanted to drive around a station on a buggy,” she says, after doing just that. Life goal: complete.
“Look at that. Look at that. Look at THAT,” she points at a flower, then a bird, and lastly a tree.
“I look so happy,” she notes, examining a photo of herself taken after our sunset dinner at the property’s beach shack overlooking the ocean. In it, she’s wearing sunglasses that I told her to put on because she looked tipsy after her second glass of Prosecco.
“You just reminded me of Russell Coight,” she tells me, through laughter, after I jumped out of our buggy to open a gate on our morning tour to Emu Creek. Thanks, Ma.“How can you cook so many good things?” she asks Travis over our lunch of local snapper and fresh greens.
“Can you take a photo of me and my cocktail,” she asks me, sipping from her first ever Aperol Spritz.
“I tried to have an afternoon nap, but I didn’t want to miss anything,” she tells Chase ahead of our afternoon cruise at Sweet’s Lagoon. Chase’s motto just so happens to be, ‘There’s plenty of time for laying down when you’re dead.’
“There it is! There it is again! Oh my God, there it is!!” she says when we spot local croc Nitro from our boat cruising down Sweet’s Lagoon, off Finniss River, which has the third largest population of saltwater crocodiles in the world.
“What a privilege,” Mum says about being the first guests to do the river cruise on The Patricia, named after the station owner’s Mum.
“God that boy can cook,” she says while eating a plate of Travis’s lamb cooked over the fire outside.
“I’ve never tasted anything like this,” she says of the gourmet s’mores also cooked over the fire for dessert.
“What’s in this that makes it taste so good?” she asks Travis of the mulled wine we’re drinking by the fire under the stars.
“That’s the best thing I’ve done in my whole life. Apart from giving birth to you, of course,” she says, summing up our day.
“Alley! You didn’t take a single photo of me with the cows,” Mum says in the morning after Travis takes us to meet Warty, the friendly Brahman in the homestead paddock. Admittedly, I was too busy taking selfies with him. Sorry, Ma.
“I want to stay here forever,” she declares.
“My favourite thing was seeing the crocodiles in the wild, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she says when we reminisce about the weekend that was. Mine was seeing a shooting star while we ate our dessert and sipped our mulled wine by the fire outside listening to Midnight Oil’s ‘Beds are Burning.’
“You should title your story, ‘The Place No-One Wants To Leave,’” she adds.“Oh, isn’t that just lovely, Alley,” she smiles, after Travis gives her a hand-picked waterlily as a parting gift.
“If I die today, I die happy (Alley’s driving home),” she posts on Facebook, with a smirking emoji.
“Slow down on the corners, darl,” she reminds me. Again.
Mum’s rating of Finniss River Lodge: “100/100.”
For more, visit finnissriverlodge.com.au. The author (and her mum) stayed as a guest of the Finniss River Lodge.
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