Home to the southern cassowary, one of the world's largest flightless birds, crocodiles, fruit bats and a host of other animals and plants, the Daintree lowlands have become one of Australia’s most beautiful icons.
With an unbroken history of over 100 million years, the tropical rainforests of the Daintree lowlands are, miraculously, still surviving and inspiring people such as Robin. However their future is, like so much of the world's remaining rainforests, dire. The Daintree lowlands, for that is the really unique and unprotected area, is under immediate threat from, not logging, but piecemeal development.The Daintree has had a long history of attempts at human settlement since the beginnings of the 1900's. After the Great Depression, settlers were encouraged to go there as leasehold farmers, to "fill the north,” clear the forests and set up farms. Luckily, this ancient forest proved tougher than the farmers, and their leaseholds were bought out by an enterprising local real estate agent, and freeholded, and subdivided into over 1100 two to four acre blocks with the blessing of the then Queensland Government, in the late 1970's.
So far about 3/4 of the blocks have been sold, but only one quarter of these have been settled, with most owners desperately wanting to leave - it is a very difficult climate to live in, and is remote from urban amenities. Few are as attuned to the forest as was Robin, and new settlers want urban amenities - schools, shops, hospitals and grid connected electricity for their air-conditioning. During the environmentally heady days (for Australia) of the mid-90's some land was bought back, but it was far too little. In fact over 300 property owners offered their land for sale. With the changing political climate the Australian Federal Government has become increasingly hostile to environmental issues, let alone the concept of buy-back, even though it would secure for the future this endangered land as well as that of the very profitable nature tourism industry that relies on it.
Once common between Cape Tribulation and Mission Beach, some 300 km to the south, the rainforests of the Daintree represent the only remaining remnant that is still capable of surviving into the future, the rest have been cut down for sugar-cane fields, urban development and grazing land.
Of all the rainforests in the world, the Daintree is the one that CAN be saved, and once saved, will support a nature based tourism economy that will further protect the area.
Robin Easton's book, Naked in Eden really captures the essence of the Daintree - the forests, the isolation, and the inhabitants, animal and human. Even with the increase in population and the "gentrification," little dramas of the sort that Robin describes happen every day - the python in the kitchen, the tree falling through the roof, walking into a stinging tree. But it is an area whose life may be measured in years, a very few years at that. Like the dodo - the Daintree may very rapidly become a thing of the past, of legend, unless we act now.
* Dr. Hugh Spencer is co-founder and director of the Cape Tribulation Tropical Research Station and the Australian Tropical Research Foundation (AUSTROP) located in the Daintree Lowland Rainforest of Far North Queensland, Australia. This dedicated and hardworking scientist was awarded the "2002 Unsung Hero of Australian Science" from the Australian Science Communicators. For more information about the Daintree, internships and volunterships go to (AUSTROP)
*Did you know...that the saltwater crocodile is the largest reptile on Earth and the only living member of the class Archosauria, the ruling reptiles of the Mesozoic era? Their ancestors first arrived on Earth two hundred million years ago, before the extraordinary age of the dinosaur. They were alive when Tyrannosaurus rex, the Earth’s most daunting predator, roamed the planet. Crocs are still here. They survived the break up of the continents. Their genetic blueprint is so tough and dynamic; they survived the ice ages of the last two million years when sheets of ice periodically covered the Earth. Early humans and crocodiles were driven to the equator’s lazy warmth to survive.
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