Saturday 27 August 2022.
Highlights: Crossing into the NT, Outback landscape, the amazing Tom Curtain Katherine Outback Experience.

Today was our last day in northern Western Australia with Northern Territory our next stop. It was a quick 20 minute drive to the border with a quick stop to capture the moment before losing 1 hour 30 minutes changing time zones.

From here we did two pit stops to break up our 5 hour 500 kilometre drive to Katherine. The first stop was at Timber Creek and second stop was at one of the Victoria River crossings. Looking at the prices in the general stores it’s hard to understand how people survive as most prices started 50% higher than Melbourne but could be 200% higher.

Arriving in Katherine we quickly checked in and left 5 minutes later to the Tom Curtain Katherine Outback Experience. Tom Curtain is a multiple award winning singer songwriter, horseman and dog trainer.

This was a live training performance with crowd entertainment thrown in. Tom would sing some of his songs but mostly he was training horses and dogs. Tom would explained exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it.

At one point he was controlling five dogs and two of them were only in their third show. The inexperienced dogs had to be told commends a few times and Tom highlighted how to use different tones.

The highlight however was when he started riding a horse without a bridle just using sitting positions. He then bought in four other horses who he controlled with verbal commends and finally he stood on his horse and played the guitar and sang a song. It was incredible!