Don’t get me wrong, five star is lovely (when I can get it), but it was not the reason I got excited about going to Australia. One of my oldest friends was getting married and flew me out to Tropical North Queensland to be her bridesmaid and I was thrilled at the prospect of encountering coral reefs, rainforests and a whole range of flora and fauna that had acquired almost mythical status to a daughter of the northern hemisphere. The luxury was an added bonus. Particularly after travelling for thirty hours in the most uncomfortable airline seats ever invented (Cathay Pacific, your shell seats suck), crammed into a window seat by hoards of Chinese students wearing face masks. These people need to be politely informed that, for the same reason that you won’t lose weight if you consume Ryvitas as a supplement to a diet of burgers and fried chicken, face masks will not protect you from the (overblown but profitable) flu pandemic if you remove them to sneeze and splutter into your hands and then wipe them across the airline seat.
So the hotel was a welcome retreat after the trials of modern travel. After oohing and ahhing over the king-size bed, crisp linen, minibar and corner bath, I headed straight to Four Mile Beach only one hundred paces from my room, to stand with arms outstretched in devotion to the luxury of heat and light. I’m not used to this style of living. I’m a back-pack and cheap guesthouse girl, so my world had been turned upside down in so many ways already.
Four Mile Beach
The walk into town took a leisurely half hour along the beach, including time to splash toes en route. The serene Coral Sea is reluctant to relinquish her riches, making the sand so pure that beachcombing became a serious treasure hunt for pebbles, amethyst-coloured shells and sections of coral washed in from the reef. Port Douglas is a hippy dream and I felt at home immediately. It’s amazing how a few degrees of latitude change clothing lassitude. Supermarket dictums hold no sway here. No one wears shoes, excepting flip-flops. No one wears very much, actually, and to spend an entire day walking around streets, shops and restaurants completely barefoot was my own definition of personal luxury. The laid-back, easy, conversational style of the locals was conducive to immediate benevolence, and in June, straight after the Winter Solstice, the weather was hot without being stifling.
I explored the range of entertainment on offer. Apart from the pub advertising nightly Cane Toad racing, the main street was mostly lined with good-looking restaurants, shops devoted to beachwear or semi-precious jewellery, and a range of really cool cafes including Re:Hab, noted for its good flat whites. It also displayed a large list of very sensible house rules including: “Anyone requesting country, progressive jazz or gospel will be asked to leave.”
A radiation of ochre enticed me into the Bundarra Gallery, home to a beautiful collection of Aboriginal art. I was immediately drawn to The Witchdoctor’s Wife by Linda Syddick Tjungkiya Wukula, which depicts the artist’s experience of seeing windmills for the first time. Discussing the work with the gallery manager, I was told that these paintings are probably the last of their kind as this unique, older generation dies out. Old age, illness and a Western lifestyle are taking their toll on a people who were healthier in the bush, eating food appropriate to their bodies’ evolution. That other Western ill, colonial conceit, has also caught up with their craft. Apparently there are now troupes of art undergraduates arrogantly trying to teach Aboriginal artists how to paint ‘properly’. I’m staggered at the temerity of a bunch of trainees giving painting lessons to anybody, let alone someone whose birth certificate is the land itself.
At the other end of the main street stood the local, multi-denominational chapel, St Mary’s By The Sea, a pretty, white wooden building with probably one of the most beautiful altar frescoes in the world. Shutters open to reveal a clear blue bay bordered by an overhanging tree, except that this particular form of art is nature’s own. It would be worth tying the knot in church for such a backdrop. We’d met a guy on the plane who was getting married there and we congregated to give him surprise congratulations as he took his crimson-clad lady by the arm and walked down the aisle to electric guitars blasting out ‘Here Comes the Bride’.
The same area was transformed at the weekend when the Sunday Market rolled into town, and I met Uncle Friday from Thursday Island (allegedly) who wove palm leaf animals and bowls. Here also were stalls selling home-spun and dyed textiles, seed jewellery and sea motifs, fresh coconut juice, glass bowls recycled from old windows, tie dye, silver ash and maple, Australian coffee and chocolates blended with chilli or lemon myrtle. Gangs of motorbikes gathered, YaYa’s (a derogatory term for Germans in campervans) headed off to the hills, and we sat under cool canopies consuming Johnny Cakes for breakfast and ice cold beer for lunch.
On The Inlet
One afternoon, I was told that I was going to meet George the Groper, which sounds rather like a scenario from a 70s sitcom. George was, in fact, a fish. A very large fish with a very large, puckering mouth. Stories abound of gropers engulfing the heads of hapless divers only to spit them out again in disgust. We gathered at local eatery, On The Inlet, to enjoy happy hour while they pumped out James Brown and Steppenwolf at full volume. Then at 5pm everyone huddled by the railings, drinks in hand, and peered into the water. A carcass was dangled over the side and the THX cinema riff roared through the speakers followed by the theme to Jaws.
We waited. John Williams played to our expectations. We sipped our drinks and heart rates increased.
The handler wiggled the carcass.
Still nothing.
Then, out of nowhere, a huge dark shadow swept into the shallows, opened its enormous Mick Jagger lips, grabbed a chunk of meat and disappeared into the depths. That was it. George’s party trick. While we tucked into our own carcasses half an hour later, I spotted George sneaking back to finish off his meal away from public gaze. George was no fool.
I settled back to relish the sunset, watching the little black spider crabs on the rocks, the Chinese junks and steam boats heading back to harbour, fringed by a haze of smoke from the distant sugar cane fields as the stubble was put to flame. There’s fierce argument over the cane-burning season, which produces a huge amount of greenhouse gases and associated air pollution. One pilot scheme in New South Wales has been set up whereby cane residue will be burnt at new power plants to generate renewable energy, but it is only one project for a huge industry whose intensity has led to an alarming level of soil degradation. Land is simply not allowed to lie fallow for long. It is pumped with fertilisers, which don’t actually fertilise the soil but are washed away into the inlets and rivers, with devastating effects on local habitats. Eating the delicious, local fish such as mackerel, yellow fin tuna or barramundi, it crossed my mind that I was ingesting more than I bargained for.
That night, struggling with jetlag, I finally got to sleep in the early hours of the morning only to be woken by the most blood-curdling scream I have ever heard. It sounded like the massacre of a basketful of puppies. Upon polite enquiry at reception (“Excuse me, was someone murdered last night?”) I was told that the noise was courtesy of the Bush Stone-Curlew, also appropriately known as the ‘screaming woman’ bird, although Aborigines believe that they house the spirits of the dead, which strikes me as a far more logical explanation.
Bleary-eyed, I gulped down coffee and climbed into the car for my introduction to Daintree rainforest, a World Heritage Site and older than the Amazon by 50 million years. Apart from its tremendous biodiversity, Daintree is also a repository for those who want to disappear, the ones who have outstayed the visa or parole. You just leave your mobile and computer behind and walk into the shadows. Apparently there are whole communities in there spending their days living off a rudimentary form of hydroelectric power and growing their own smiley stuff. After I had been told this, my friend looked at me very seriously. “You’re not thinking of making a run for it?” I didn’t realise that the fugitive mentality twitching in my limbs was so obvious. I laughed nervously at her perception. No. Not here. Not yet. But it was a close call.
Daintree Icecream Company
We started at the Daintree Icecream Company, where all the plants and fruits are grown and reaped on site, assuring fresh, seasonal ingredients. Our icecream that day consisted of a base of Soursop, with Black Sapote, Wattle Seed and Mango. Then up to the forest itself, leaving the car and walking through the dense brush in search of a blue water hole, my friend’s fiancé, Mark, offering up a botany lesson en route as we encountered Sensitive Mimosa – which actually recoils from touch, Wait-a-While – vines with nasty little burrs that tug you as you pass – and Blue Quondong, medicinal fruit and staple bushtucker.
After clambering over roots and down a steep path, we found the water hole, which was indeed turquoise blue. A tricky, painful wobble over stones and pebbles, including chunks of ochre, and we were in, splashing with delight through the clear, fresh water. We felt smug and proprietorial about our water hole. We were primal beings, the first and last humans to ever exist. We were explorers, adventurers, brave and bold and we would serve up stories of derring do for our astonished friends. Mark was exploring the perimeter. “Look”, he yelled and pointed. A solitary toothbrush dangled from a bush. We were not the first visitors. Nor would we be the last, for someone else was shouting at us. A young couple stood on the hillock above looking both disappointed and perturbed. “Is there anything in there that will eat us?” We laughed and made our way towards our towels.
Our next stop was Mossman Gorge, a fast flowing section of river and one of the most photographed spots in the region. By this time, I needed a pee. Adjacent to the parking area was a hut-like set of simple, unlit toilets. I charged into the last cubicle, slammed the door and prepared to pull down my shorts. Just then I spotted the shadowy outline of something very large and leggy clinging to the door. Oh shit, there was no easy escape. I decided to keep as calm as possible. Doing up my shorts, I slithered along the cubicle wall, tentatively fumbled for the door handle, gently pulled and insinuated myself through about four inches of crack before breathing again. “Stay calm, stay calm”, I kept telling myself. My bladder was bursting. I’d have to make a second attempt. I went to the opposite end of the hut, pushed open the door and had a good look around the cubicle before exposing my nether regions to any more wildlife.
As soon as I left the loos, my heart went into overdrive and it took me fifteen minutes to calm down. Yes, I’m an arachnophobe. Big time. I used to refuse to stay in any room inhabited by an eight-legged lurker until I knew that it had been removed. I’m convinced that I only entered into serious relationships so that I had a man in the house to dispose of the buggers. Once single, I succumbed to ploughing through Kaleidoscope and other worthy publications in search of a technical marvel that would discard both the necessity of running to neighbours to dispose of the big hairy monsters and the uneasy feeling that my life hitherto had been devoid of the necessities of sauna pants and a set of four spring-mounted meerkats.
I found my grail, a battery-operated suction tube that works on the principle of a wine glass and postcard, but with more distance. I affectionately call it my Sucky Sucky (just as I call the fan heater the Blow Job). I’m single, remember. It pretty well does the trick, although it’s not infallible and arachnids with long, delicate legs are likely to have them ripped off in the process, which genuinely leaves me mortified. I digress. A short, cold dip in the Gorge (ignoring the danger signs) did the trick. Fighting a strong current is far less scary than fighting eight legs.
(c) Reef Magic
Keeping with the overarching water theme that permeates this trip, I cannot omit the highlight when I fulfilled a childhood dream and dived the Great Barrier Reef, the only organic structure visible from space. Mark, whom I’m now convinced is an angel in disguise, arranged a boat trip from Cairns, one and a half hours across a sea which used to be savannah, to the pontoon at Moore Reef. As a professional SCUBA instructor, he then personally escorted me under the waves and into Wonderland.
It had been ten years since my BSAC Sports Diver qualification lapsed, so I’d misplaced most of the fundamental diving concepts and vocabulary, such as buoyancy and equalisation. Indeed, after such a long break, autogenic responses kicked in despite my love of and comfort with water, and my body started to rebel with a slight form of breathless panic. Regaining control, I slowly descended, stopping only to clear a dodgy ear, and as my body began to remember the drill, I relaxed and sank into a new universe.
Wally the Wrasse (c) Reef Magic
It is perfectly possible to cry through a regulator, and I did. Copiously. The richness and diversity of reef life is something to behold, a vivid urban sprawl with its heaving, ever-moving population of parrot fish, stone fish, sergeant fish, clown (Nemo!) fish. My training had taught me the fundamental rule of “look don’t touch”, but I was encouraged to break taboo to gently stroke a sea cucumber and run my fingers through spaghetti coral. The star turn, though, was Wally the Hump-Headed Maori Wrasse, one of the largest fish in the world. He was actually born female and named Sarah until he changed sex at about nine years of age, and he is now an incorrigible flirt and celebrity in his own right (he has his own Facebook page. This enormous, rubber-lipped blue fish hangs around divers, posing for photos, begging for food and generally stealing the show. It never ceases to amaze me, the surprising relationships between humble animals and humans. In fact, I experienced more intelligent and friendly interaction with this fish than with most of my work colleagues.
After feeding time (for all species), we took a boat out to the reef wall for our second dive. Sunlight streamed in, segueing into tunnels of deepest blue where the wall fell away into the darkness. Here the range of coral became truly psychedelic. If you took a packet of crayons, a large piece of paper and drew a bizarre shape using random colours, I can guarantee it was down there. Mark touched me on the arm to gain attention, his other hand flat, thumb first, against his forehead. I shook my head in bewilderment. He stuck his forefinger up and move it across my eyeline, then pointed. A shark! My first ever shark! It was the generally harmless reef shark, gracefully grazing the side of the wall, the backdrop of indigo highlighting its austere, flowing elegance. I know people who would not so much as paddle in tropical waters for fear of what lies beneath. Their loss. Perhaps I am an obsessive hoarder of beauty, but such greed sometimes requires a degree of risk. I don’t want to reach the end of my life with a range of second hand memories garnered from a TV screen.
Coral near the surface exudes its own sun tan oil, with a protection factor of 300. Inevitably, scientists have tried to exploit this for human use and I’m delighted to report that it doesn’t work. It just slides off the skin. The reef is under enough threat from global warming and pollution without abusing its delicate ecology further simply because human beings cannot be bothered to put on a bloody T-shirt and stay in the shade. Our oceans are the final frontier, an undiscovered country more elusive than outer space. They are the barometer of our planet’s health and they are suffering. If the oceans die, so do we. And while I’m on my soapbox, don’t ever buy coral. Ever. The shops were full of the damn stuff – not from the Reef, but plundered from unprotected zones elsewhere in the world.
In the run up to the wedding, I lazed like a wanton nymph, bathing naked in the sea or lying by the pool sipping cocktails. We built a monster sandcastle on the beach, to the envy of the children who came to watch, and decorated it with tattered rags, shells and seaweed. At night, I stood and gazed at the thick, creamy Milky Way threading through the sky. Scorpius lay low and bright and the Southern Cross, known locally as the Four Sisters, remained the unswerving sentinel of the South. Low on the horizon hovered my ruling planet, Jupiter, so bright that it cast its own beam across the sea. The waxing moon herself was a Cheshire cat, her crescent inverted into a smile or a goblet. I love stargazing. It makes me feel so small yet so alive, as if every foolish trouble and mistake shrivels into insignificance and all that is left is void, sparkle, expansion and brevity. In that eternal split second, a dropped jaw is as important and ephemeral as the furthest galaxy.
A few days later, after dinner, three of us decided to walk back from Port Douglas along the beach under the now full moon. Being so near the equator, she lay directly overhead and as I slipped and sloshed through the water, I realised that I was walking on the moon itself. Mesmerised I watched each foot rise out of the sea, pale in the dark, and slip back into the water, leaving ripples of sparkling silver. I found myself walking slower and slower, hypnotised, moonstruck, scrying into the ocean, absorbed in the countless tiny particles of light trailing behind my footsteps as the phosphorescent bacteria in the water activated and created my own personal moonbeam. What should have been a twenty-five minute walk took two hours. This land casts its own siren spell. There are so many delightful ways to choose to be lost.
I certainly lost some fundamental cultural references. My religion is entrenched in nerve, blood, bone and landscape and if I have any genetic link to this continent, it is too deep, too far, too tenuous to fathom. In my cold, dark, northern home, the south beats like a drum, a Ballardian compulsion. Now I found myself within the dark heart of the sun itself, my world capsized and the element of fire became a mirage to drive me off the edge of the world and into the raging cold of the Antarctic. The moon was different. I could not identify the plants or constellations and the beguiling façade of the land disguised many poisons. Maybe I was suffering from jet lag, but I felt slightly ill, slightly out of kilter, as though to bring my gods here were a desecration, that to cling to an inappropriate liturgical calendar would break some sacred, alien rhythm. I was a guest. I could only nod my head politely and say, “I will engage but I can’t claim to understand.”
Kuranda
Once the Bride and Groom has tied the knot in an idyllic beachside wedding, the guests began to disperse. I still had a couple of days left, and was invited to stay with Mark’s parents at his skipper’s house in the foothills of the rainforest above Cairns. This gave me a chance to take the old mining rail route into the hills to Kuranda village. I found it to be a contrived, commercial visitor centre, but it was worth dipping down some of the alleys to the less obvious market stalls, where beautiful hand-made jewellery, clothes, woodcarvings and skincare products threatened to beguile away the very few dollars I had left. In the end, I decided that I would try to buy a very cheap opal, as it is the one stone that truly represents Australia. An elderly man was selling Boulder Opals, the Cinderella sister to the iridescent Black Opal that one normally covets, and he began to explain how they are mined in Queensland itself, extracted from thin veins so they can only be cut into freeform, and with an ironstone backing which gives them strength despite sometimes dulling the colour. He gathered strings of them between his fingers. “So much hard work to pluck these from the Earth. So much sweat, labour, pain for so little. Do not choose one. Let it choose you. Take your time.” I held each one in my hand, and listened to my gut reaction. I kept returning to a small irregular triangle with what looked like a double-sided map contoured in a range of russets like a desert or the bark of a tropical tree. Cutting across this landscape were pale blue rivulets. “This one.” The man looked at me. “Why?” “It’s a map of my life. Look, there’s a maze, a face, rivers, mountains.” “An eye, too.” “Perhaps. This one wants me, so I’d better take it home.” It cost me $20, about £12. The man taught me how to tie it properly and then muttered: “It’s more beautiful than I realised. I think I’ve undercharged you!” Delighted with my bargain, I skipped off back to the main street.
I’d been told to visit the Butterfly museum, but once I’d walked up the hill to the end of the village, I encountered the Australian Venom Zoo. After my spider experience, I figured it would be good therapy to face my phobia and get to know our eight-legged friends a little better. I convinced myself that if I saw lots of spiders, then some more, watched spider videos, looked at spider posters, then had a look at even more spiders, my unconscious would get bored and move on.
The young man who took my money offered to take photos (“at no extra charge”) of me holding his python (stop snorting at the back). I asked him the name of the snake. “He hasn’t got one.” I told him to call it Monty. Monty was clearly bored and if a snake could be said to exude ennui, he did so in shovelfuls. If he’d had shoulders, he’d have shrugged them. He lay inert in my hands, although the newspaper clipping pinned to the wall of the museum detailing how a python had swallowed a local family dog did catch my attention. Monty would have probably preferred to smoke a pipe. After his reluctant photoshoot, I kissed him and handed him back.
The zoo was ramshackled but charming, a research centre rather than slick industrial enterprise. Labels peeled off the cages of snakes kept in the basement, and faded newspaper cuttings and posters decorated the walls. The other creepy crawlies were on the ground floor, which is where we got down to real business. The director, Stuart Douglas, reminded me a little of J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner, possessing the offbeat attractiveness that tends to attach itself to those of passionate interests. He showed us Shingleback lizards, who pair up and live monogamously, explaining that when one dies its partner commits a sort of reptilian sati and pines away next to the body, starved and heartbroken. I removed some dust from my eye. He then moved onto the more serious stuff, bypassing the Funnel Web cage kept behind a cordon, to bring out a massive tarantula, which he waved in our direction. “She’s got an acute sense of smell”, he explained, “like a dog. She can smell your fear and will react accordingly.” I tried not to smell of fear. He went on to unfold the secret and amazing life of arachnids. Their silk contains complex proteins, both pure and very strong. The Golden Orb Weaver produces a bullet-proof web five times stronger than steel and if you need an emergency wound dressing, antiseptic homespun is as good as any bandage. In addition, tarantulas can be milked for their venom, which has been found to possess amino acids beneficial in the treatment of cardiac problems.
The study of venom in other rainforest animals is yielding extraordinary biopharmaceutical results. The Rainforest Centipede, the main reason for shaking your shoes before putting them on, produces some pretty nasty venom that will paralyse or cause extreme pain, yet the Aborigines used to deliberately inject it as a cure for arthritis. Scorpion venom produces the only known substance that regenerates brain tissue. I was worried about the exploitation of the animals but Stuart assured me that milking the venom was painless. The animal is gassed, a small electric shock is administered to produce the venom sample and the animal awakes ten minutes later slightly disgruntled, but hardly the worse for wear. As befits my love of paradox and unifying polarity, I found myself excited by this beneficence of poison and all its related metaphors.
My fortnight of adventures concluded with an understated but significant domestic nocturne in a surprising, self-sufficient environment. I know I haven’t waxed lyrical over the posh hotel facilities or the fine restaurants and it’s not that they weren’t lovely. But the skipper’s house really thrilled me. It was run by solar power, with recycled rainwater, a wormery, compost heap and a hangar for making biofuel, set in a large garden full of nature’s bounty – rambutan, pawpaw, avocado, macadamia, lime. Huge bottles layered with fragrant woodchip, contained moonshine and other bizarre alchemical experiments. Homemade beer was siphoned from a barrel stored in the fridge. Breakfast consisted of locally grown pineapple, paw-paw and avocado with a side serving of macadamia nuts from the numerous cardboard boxes stored in the garage. There was no glass in the windows, just a very fine mesh to keep out the insects and a constant stream of fresh air. I had the best night’s sleep in years as I succumbed to the gentle nursery music of the rainforest.
It consolidated a dream, an ambition for the rest of my life – to renovate or build a little home somewhere where I can live for most of the year outdoors, barefoot and completely off grid. It does not entail being a Luddite or disdaining life’s comforts. The technology is there to support the decision. It’s just finding the right place for the right price. But the serious searching starts this year and I have never been clearer about the quality of life that I now want, that I now owe myself.
Getting warmer, as they say. Oh yes, getting very warm now.
