Two years ago, an Englishman named Charlie Carlow visited an abandoned fishing camp on Bamurru Plains, in the tropical wetlands of the Northern Territory.

The humidity was suffocating, the mosquitoes were rapacious and the overgrown camp was home to termites, mud wasps and pythons. The perfect place, he thought, for Australia’s first luxury safari lodge.

You have to admire Charlie’s vision – especially from the 32ft infinity pool on Bamurru’s chic observation deck. From here, as I wallow, the vast lens of blue sky is being distorted by monsoon rainstorms that bulge and totter.

They appear as distant drapes and, when the hot sun pours through the gaps, the grassy wetlands gleam emerald and silver, shimmering all the way to the horizon.

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A matter of 100yd from my bottle of boutique beer and my plate of canapés, there are animals – a commingling of critters moving slowly through the silent shallows. I can see one-ton water buffaloes with rafter-like horns grazing among handsome wild horses. It’s a strange sight, made stranger by the agile wallabies that dart across the wetlands, chips of water sparkling in their wake.

A sea eagle swoops from a dead tree, low and slow into the meadows, to snatch a fish. And somewhere out there, idly luxuriating in this overspilling ecosystem, is the world’s largest population of saltwater crocodiles.

The Bamurru Wilderness Lodge lies close to Swim Creek, tucked away in the corner of a 100-square-mile cattle station named after the body of water.

“Swim Creek? Is that Australian irony?” “Yeah, I think it is,” says the lodge manager, John O’Shea. “In their worst year, the station lost 1,000 buffaloes to the crocs. And they only keep 4,000.”

Crocodiles have been here for 60m years, but buffaloes were brought from Indonesia in the 1850s to provide meat and milk. My canapés, incidentally, include a fine buffalo mozzarella. Watching their great black bodies sink into the deeper waters, I can’t help but wonder – just how big can a croc get?

“Big. We’ve seen a 16ft croc over on Sanpan Creek. He’s probably about 70 years old.”

“Do they come close to the lodge?”

“My word, they do. But you’ve got to be more careful about the buffaloes. They can get a bit cranky.”

So it’s a good thing that the game lodge and its nine bungalows are on stilts.

The design of Bamurru ticks off all the essentials of the safari-lodge experience: lots of aromatic timber, plenty of textured furnishings in earth-tone fabrics, fixtures fashioned from bits of flora and fauna (as door handles, buffalo horns make a real statement). Though it is luxurious, the use of rippling galvanised iron evokes the hard-bitten Aussie cattlemen who battled to raise herds out here.

The walls are hung with pioneer relics and sepia photos of monster reptile trophies. Naturally, there is also the all-important “fourth wall”, or lack of it – screened against insects, but open to the elements, so you can lie in bed and twinkle your toes under starlight, maybe catching the authentic whiff of a buffalo as it lumbers through the lamp-lit camp.

WHEN YOU’RE paying £875 per couple per night, you expect to be blown away by a safari experience. Bamurru guarantees this with its airboats – Teflon-bottomed punts mounted with fans so powerful, they will skittle you in their airstream. The noise is extraordinary and the rush is unreal: the 454bhp engine sends us careening over the wetlands, giving us a lawnmower’s-eye view and spattering us with seeds, insects and small frogs. We roar off towards the swamps to drift among the mangroves, croc-spotting. The waters here are brown and still, and we scan for bubbles, eyes and snouts, spotting several “logodiles” before eventually finding our quarry.

She’s a tiddler at “only” 6ft long, nothing like the toothy leviathans that can crunch down on a passing outboard motor. For now, she’s floating peaceably on the water. DURING MONSOON season, the storm clouds go to war in the afternoon, sending down rains that are savage, warm and over in a flash. They then politely clear themselves away, making room for some peerless sunsets.

Of course, sunset-watching is another safari-lodge stalwart. It heralds the pouring of G&Ts, the lighting of campfires and preparations for the evening meal, where strangers bond over their personal perspectives on wilderness and civilisation. Bamurru has captured all this stuff and become the first luxury lodge to really make safari work in an Australian context.

Yet it is more than an African transplant – it’s a perfect window onto a very Australian wilderness. If anyone should doubt it, they need only look into that same sunset to see something many Aussies invoke as a wildlife icon, but precious few ever get to see.

Just yards from our observation deck, beneath a sky that rages pink and purple, are those agile wallabies – dozens of them. Their fur is tinged with silver from the oblique light. Several are pairing off and rocking back on their hind legs to face each other. And they’re boxing.

Travel brief

Two nights at Bamurru (00 61 2 9571 6399, www.bamurruplains.com) cost £1,063pp, based on two sharing and including all food and drink, the airboat tour, a game drive and return flights from Darwin (20 minutes by light aircraft).

Getting there: Qantas (0845 774 7767, www.qantas.co.uk) flies from Heathrow to Darwin via Singapore; from about £1,100. If you want to visit Bamurru as part of a longer itinerary, it’s a three-hour drive from Darwin to Swim Creek Station airstrip.

Tour operators: with Bridge & Wickers (020 7483 6555, www.bridgeandwickers.co.uk), a 10-night trip taking in Darwin, Lizard Island and Daintree, with three nights at Bamurru, starts at £4,998pp, including flights from Heathrow via Singapore with Qantas, domestic light-aircraft transfers and most meals. Or try Abercrombie & Kent (0845 070 0600, www.abercrombiekent.co.uk), Audley (01869 276250, www.audleytravel.com) or Turquoise (01494 678400, www.turquoiseholidays.co.uk).

When to go: June to September is most popular, because it’s dry season, it’s cooler and transport is more reliable. February to April is dramatic: stormy and wild, with fewer visitors.

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