Daintree Rainforest

Where it sits. The Daintree covers roughly 1,200 square kilometres of tropical lowland and upland rainforest on the Queensland coast north of Cairns, running from the Mossman River up past the Daintree River to Cooktown and inland to the Great Dividing Range. Its defining feature is the meeting of two World Heritage areas: at Cape Tribulation the rainforest comes down to the sand and the Great Barrier Reef begins offshore, and there is nowhere else on earth where a forest of this age touches a reef of this size. The Bloomfield Track continues north beyond Cape Tribulation as a rough four-wheel-drive route to Wujal Wujal and Cooktown.

Why it matters scientifically. This is a relict of the rainforest that covered Gondwana. Estimates put its continuous existence at around 180 million years, which makes it perhaps 100 million years older than the Amazon, and it survived because this stretch of coast stayed wet through the ice ages when the rest of the continent dried out. The consequences are extraordinary: about 3,000 plant species from close to 210 families, more than 900 tree species, and a concentration of primitive flowering plants — including the Idiot Fruit, Idiospermum australiense, a living fossil rediscovered in 1971 after a herd of cattle died eating its seeds. Roughly 30 per cent of Australia's frog, reptile and marsupial species and 90 per cent of its bat and butterfly species live in the Wet Tropics, which occupy well under one per cent of the continent. UNESCO inscribed the Wet Tropics of Queensland in 1988.

The people. The eastern Kuku Yalanji are the traditional owners, and on 29 September 2021 the Queensland government formally returned 160,213 hectares — including Daintree National Park and the country from Mossman to Cooktown — to Kuku Yalanji ownership, with a transition to sole Aboriginal management. Guided walks at Mossman Gorge run through the Kuku Yalanji cultural centre and are the best way to understand the forest as a worked, named and used landscape rather than as scenery.

On screen. Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) was largely shot in this country. The production spent about 100 days in Australia — far more than the 24 days it managed in the Solomon Islands, where malaria confined filming to daylight hours — and used the Daintree Rainforest and Bramston Beach, south of Innisfail, to stand in for Guadalcanal. The grass-hill assault sequences were staged on high ground the crew called Dancer Mountain, where the terrain was so rough that trailers and production trucks could not get up and roughly 250 actors and 200 crew had to be moved by other means, taking two hours each way. The resulting footage is why a film about a 1942 Pacific battle looks like north Queensland: the vine forest, the palm-fringed beach and the wind moving through kunai grass are all Australian.

What you actually see today. Access from the south crosses the Daintree River on a cable ferry that runs roughly every fifteen minutes; there is no bridge, and the queue on a July morning can take half an hour. North of the river the sealed road climbs to the Alexandra Range lookout, then runs through forest to Cow Bay, Thornton Beach, the Marrdja and Dubuji boardwalks, and Cape Tribulation itself, named by Cook in June 1770 after his ship struck the reef offshore. Boardwalks are the sensible way to see the forest floor. The Daintree Discovery Centre near Cow Bay has an aerial walkway and a 23-metre canopy tower. Southern cassowaries — flightless, up to 1.8 metres tall, and genuinely capable of injuring a person — are seen crossing the road, and the speed limits exist for their sake.

Getting there and timing. Port Douglas, an hour north of Cairns, is the usual base; the ferry is another hour on. Day tours run from Cairns and Port Douglas, but two nights north of the river is a completely different experience, with night walks and a forest that gets very dark and very loud. The dry season, May to September, brings lower humidity and passable tracks; the wet, from December to March, can close the Bloomfield Track entirely and pushes rainfall past four metres a year in places. Estuarine crocodiles inhabit the Daintree River and the beaches — swimming in the river or the sea is not safe, and box jellyfish are present from November to May. Freshwater swimming holes at Emmagen Creek and Mossman Gorge are the alternative, with the usual local caution about recent rain.