Australia's Tableland tableau

North of Port Douglas the coast highway turns inland and climbs a steep, rainforest-clad escarpment. The air cools as the trees lean over to enclose the road. Openings in the canopy frame vignettes of sugarcane fields around Mossman and hazy beaches sweeping north to Cape Tribulation.

At the top of the hill the road levels out on to the Atherton Tableland. The rainforest gives way to dry eucalypt bush. In a few kilometres I have swapped the sweltering, tropical coast for the Australian Outback.

Kookaburras cackle in the gum trees. Slump-backed, corrugated-iron buildings decay in bush clearings. Jacaranda trees flash purple amid the muted greys and greens.

Lying inland from the coast between Innisfail in the south and Port Douglas in the north, the Atherton Tableland sweeps westward to the Great Dividing Range.

Although few places on the Tableland are more than an hour's drive from Cairns, mass tourism has yet to encroach on its rich farmland, tiny lakes, pockets of rainforest and misty hills.

Cropping - mangoes, sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee - and cattle still form the basis of the local economy. The brick-red soil is deep and fertile and huge irrigation schemes crisscross the landscape with ribbons of liquid silver.

I stop for a cold drink at Mt Molloy, a somnolent village where, for a few hundred metres, thundering Kenworth trucks have to slow down before roaring on with an air-horn blast north towards Cape York.

Mt Molloy was once a Queensland boom town, the economic hub of the Palmer River goldfields on whose fortunes Cairns and Port Douglas were founded. A couple of Toyota Landcruisers, coated in red dust, are angle-parked outside the pub. Nothing moves apart from flocks of dunny budgies (flies).

I follow a corrugated dirt track to a lonely bush cemetery where the grave of the man who discovered the goldfield, James Venture Mulligan (1837-1902), lies surrounded by anthills.

The headstone, erected by "a few of his mates", describes how Mulligan "died from injuries received while breaking up a fight in the hotel". It seems ironic that Mulligan, having survived countless scrapes during his prospecting days, should die from a misdirected punch thrown by a drunken miner in the Mt Molloy pub.

On the way back to the main road a huge red kangaroo bounces across the track in front of me.

The savannah country surrounding the Mareeba Wetlands is parched. The rutted road skirts giant termite mounds standing like tombstones amid the scrub. Created by the outfall of the West Barron Irrigation System, the wetlands lie on the main avian migratory route across North Queensland.

At the Wetlands Visitor Centre beside Clancy's Lagoon, I sit with a cup of tea in the shade of the observation deck and watch flights of whistler ducks arrive. Wooden canoes can be hired, and I spend an hour paddling happily among the water lilies covering the surface of the lagoon as comb-crested jacanas hop from pad to pad.

After lunch at Tolga I take a side road into the Danbulla State Forest. The road twists through dense rainforest along the northern shore of Lake Tinaroo. The lake margins are fringed with reedy marshes where purple swamp hens ( New Zealanders will recognise them as pukeko) mooch in the shallows. Many tiny inlets finger the bush, choked with the skeletons of trees drowned when the lake was raised for irrigation storage. Pelicans and cormorants sun themselves on the dead branches.

Eventually, the road emerges on the Gillies Highway near Lake Barrine, a circular crater lake completely surrounded by rainforest. I am just in time for afternoon smoko, and the Lake Barrine Tea House serves the finest Devonshire teas in North Queensland.

Afterwards I wander along the lakeshore to a glade where twin kauri trees, the largest specimens in Australia, grow amid a forest of red cedar and black bean.

At dawn next day I am on the road to Topaz. Mist fills the valleys and the rising sun casts long shadows across rolling farmland. Neatly clipped tea plantations cloak the hillsides.

There is nothing at Topaz except a decrepit farmhouse with a pack of baying dogs chained up outside. I retrace my route and spend the morning following random back roads which lead to tiny crater lakes, glittering waterfalls and patches of rainforest where giant fig trees grow and the rasping of cicadas sounds like escaping steam.

Ken, Dave and Skip are propping up the bar in the Hotel Tully Falls ("The Highest Pub in Queensland") when I saunter in for a midday drink. The two-storey pub dominates the town of Ravenshoe, perched on the western edge of the Tableland.

As soon as I ask for a beer they pick me as a New Zealander and the usual bag of wisecracks is trundled out at my expense.

"They're a very patriotic people the Kiwis," Skip announces from beneath an Akubra hat the size of a dustbin lid. "They'll do anything for their country except live in it."

That evening I sit at an outside cafe table in downtown Cairns. After the silence of the Tableland, the neon frenzy of The Esplanade jolts my senses. As the hubbub of nightlife spins around me, I think of the placid waters of Lake Barrine and the cool, convivial atmosphere of the Hotel Tully Falls.

For a moment I'm tempted to drive back to Ravenshoe. I could be there in time for last orders.

I'm tempted ... but I order another cappuccino instead.

Atherton Tableland

Atherton Shire Council

Case notes

* Getting there

Air New Zealand flies from Auckland to Cairns. Expect to pay from around $962 economy return.

Port Douglas is a two-hour drive north of Cairns along the Captain Cook Highway.

Hertz has rental vehicles available for pickup at Cairns Airport.

A small 4WD such as a Toyota Rav4 is ideal for exploring the back roads of the Tableland. Expect to pay around $115 a day, plus insurance.

* Accommodation

The Honeyflow Homestead at Milanda.

This is a good base for exploring the Tableland. Its four suites open onto a wrap-around verandah and cost from A$105/couple, including breakfast. You can watch platypuses in the creek nearby.

Ph 61 7 4096 8173. Fax 61 7 4096 8099.

email: info@honeyflow.com.au

Honeyflow

* Things to see and do

The Mareeba Wetlands

Open seven days 8.30am-4pm.

Reserve Conservation Levy payable by all visitors, A$8 adult, A$5 child. Canoe hire A$11 an hour, ( A$6 half-hour.

Twilight reserve Safari A$30 an adult, A$15 child.

Ph: 61 7 4054 4889, fax: 61 7 4054 3587

Mareeba Wetlands

* More information

Australian Tourism Commission, PO Box 1666, Auckland.

Ph (09) 379 9594; fax 09 307 3117

email kbroeking@atc.gov.au

* Fergus Blakiston visited Australia courtesy of Air New Zealand and the Australian Tourism Commission.