Walkabout on the wild side

"See these berries?" says Kambikari, our shy Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal guide, pointing at the pretty fruit dangling from a finger cherry as we amble along a rainforest track in the Mossman Gorge, just north of Port Douglas. "They're okay to eat," he says, and I could be tempted, until he mumbles, matter-of-factly, "but if you touch them and rub your eyes, you go blind." Permanently, that is.

From that point, I only half-jokingly tread the remainder of the track with my arms pinned to my sides, not daring to touch anything.

Kambikari, through whose eyes we glimpse an ancient world, grew up in the Aboriginal settlement at Mossman Gorge. The community operates Kuku Yalanji Dreamtime Walks, leisurely hour-and-a-half excursions into the neighbouring Wet Tropics rainforest, with guides whose commentary couldn't be more authentic.

Kambikari (otherwise known as Uncle Raymond) numbers one of only 1000 surviving Kuku Yalanji in northeast Queensland. In the tradition of his hunter-gatherer ancestors, who for thousands of years sourced food, medicine and shelter in what is now the World Heritage-listed Daintree National Park, he knows all about the eccentricities of the rainforest.

He also knows a wealth of survival tricks, including how to leach toxins from poisonous rainforest fruit to make them edible, and cunning ways to trap game.

"See this leaf?" he says, tugging it from a branch. "If you rub your hands with it in the creek, fish float up [to the surface] asleep," he grins, with a look that says sedated fish make an easy catch.

Snapping off a branch from another tree, he peels back the bark and holds it to our noses. It smells like liniment in a tube. The local footie players rub themselves with its sap to ease their post-game aches and pains.

Kambikari points out a succession of other Wet Tropics oddities as we move along, among them the piebald tree whose white-speckled frame glows in the dark, and the candlenut, an oily little nut which the Kuku Yalanji burn for lighting.

Not all the rainforest's plants are so benign. Take the Wait-a-While, the climbing palm armed with hooks and barbs. Become entangled in them and try to pull away and they dig deeper into your flesh. To extricate yourself, "wait-a-while" and ease the barbs out, he explains.

As for the plant we see with the heart-shaped nettles that inflict a cruel sting persisting for months, no antidote exists, even in this Aboriginal bush pharmacy.

Like most visitors to the holiday town of Port Douglas and its environs, we came here to gaze, goggle-eyed, at the underwater world of the Great Barrier Reef, with its sea stars, giant clams, turtles and technicoloured shoals of fish.

Until now, we had known next to nothing about the tropical rainforest that rolls down to meet the Daintree's reef-fringed coastline in this, the only place on the planet where two World-heritage-listed areas converge like conjoined twin feats of nature.

We didn't know that the national park, with its thick throngs of trees reaching into the sky, its fast-flowing streams and dense mangrove habitats alongside broad, crocodile-infested rivers, holds the oldest tracts of pristine rainforest in the world, dating back 135 million years.

Nor did we know it houses the most diverse menageries of flora and fauna in Australia.

Almost a complete history of the evolution of plant life on Earth flourishes here. One dozen of the world's 19 ancient angiosperms (rare, primitive flowering plants) grow in the wet, tropical rainforests of northeast Queensland.

And although these rainforests represent just 1 per cent of Australia's vast land area, they accommodate one-third of the country's varieties of marsupials, including the peculiar, possum-like tree kangaroo that nimbly moves about backwards, as well as almost two-thirds of its butterfly species and one quarter of its frogs, not forgetting a fair number of Australia's rapacious reptiles, of course, including the estuarine crocodile.

Luckily, we don't need to be on guard for these on this track because the chilly streams at Mossman Gorge are one of the few waterways they avoid.

But there are other reasons to worry. "The ancestors are still here," Kambikari says casually, like someone talking about family who haven't moved away. Ghosts who walk the same track we walk, eyeing us anonymously.

We climb the track to a giant, 600-year-old strangler fig, a tangled mass of knitted branches that has long since suffocated the sacrificial host tree. Now, it hosts birds such as the tiny fig parrot which feast on its fruit.

Here Kambikari regales us with a tale of the tourists' photographs taken from this same spot that exposed three ghostly Aboriginal figures standing on one of the many dome-like granite boulders that have tumbled down from the mountains.

With our walkabout over, we linger under the shade of a bark wurun (shelter), drinking billy tea and eating buttered damper, when an emblem of the Daintree rainforest, an iridescent sky-blue and black Ulysses butterfly, flutters past. Ah, it feels as if the Dreamtime really is caressing us.

We drive a further 45 minutes north to our next destination. (Distances are surprisingly short in this corner of Australia.) Past paddocks of Brahman cattle, sugar cane and banana plantations, through the winding rainforest roads - and over scores of speed-bumps installed to prevent cars from bumping into jaywalker cassowaries - the odd-looking, 2m emu-like birds that sport something akin to a pre-historic rock adze fused to their heads.

The journey brings us to Cape Tribulation, where Captain Cook's Endeavour famously ran into a hidden reef and limped into what is now the port of Cooktown to repair the ship's hull.

It's not far from where botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander saw their first "kangaroo" (a word they learned from the Kuku Yalanji) and a sorry sailor crossed paths with a flying fox, an alarming experience he recounted in the ship's log: "I have seen a devil, he was as large as a one gallon keg and very like it. He had horns and wings, yet he crept so slowly through the grass that if I had not been afeared I might have touched him."

Tactile encounters with the Daintree's chief devils are not recommended, however. Always remember you're in the home of that opportunistic feeder, the estuarine crocodile, with a body up to 8m long and a brain no bigger than a golf ball.

Unless you're looking to be ambushed by a croc capable of leaping out of the water at 25km/h and applying two to three tonnes of jaw pressure to your delicate torso, book yourself on one of the longer, ecotourism-accredited guided wilderness walks.

You can also watch the Steve Irwin-types coax crocs into demonstrating their notorious "death roll" - where they grip, roll and tear apart their prey - at the famous Crocodile Attack show at Hartley's Crocodile Adventures farm, a little south of Port Douglas.

With such an abundance of wildlife thriving in the rainforest, you may not see as many birds and animals as you expect. Nearly 400 species of birds live in this rainforest, but those that dwell in the lower to middle reaches of trees are well-camouflaged.

That said, the short cruise we take up the wide Daintree River on the Crocodile Express reveals a few crocs sunning themselves in muddy mangroves, several snow-white egrets and Australia's longest snake, the amethystine python, curled up in a tree in a nest-like epiphyte, a plant without ground roots supported by another host plant.

For guaranteed wildlife sightings, visit the well-stocked Rainforest Habitat wildlife sanctuary, just outside Port Douglas.

And don't miss the Sunday morning food and craft market in Port Douglas where you can meet the many local bohemians.

You can also taste "oxygenated" coconut "jungle juice" served from the shell by a grey-bearded hippie who argues, with utmost sincerity and a measure of persuasion, that the multi-purpose coconut could "bring peace to the world" if weren't for American big business (allow him to explain).

It's a different world up there.

* Tourism Australia provided Caroline Courtney with a rental vehicle.

Case notes


Seven top wildlife experiences 1 Snorkel or dive the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Marine Park. Cost: adults from about $140 a person.

2 Visit the Kuku Yalanji Dreamtime Walks at Mossman Gorge. Cost: adults about $20.

3 Walk the 2.4km loop trail at the Mossman Gorge. Another trail, the Dubuji (meaning "place of spirits") South boardwalk, has wheelchair access. For information on other walks, including longer hikes, check www.wettropics.gov.au

4 Drive about an hour north of Port Douglas to historic Daintree Village. Cruise up the Daintree River on the Crocodile Express, viewing wildlife. Cost: adults about $22.

5 Visit the Daintree Discovery Centre. Cost: adults $25. Climb the 23m Canopy Tower viewing platform to experience the rainforest ceiling up close.

6 Tuck into a big Breakfast with the Birds at the Rainforest Habitat wildlife sanctuary, just outside Port Douglas, then meet the kangaroos, snakes, koalas and many more. Cost: adults about $40.

7 Experience an adrenalin rush at Hartley's Crocodile Adventures, about 30 minutes south of Port Douglas. Highlights include crocodile and cassowary feeding. Cost: adults about $25.


Port Douglas Daintree Tourism