KEY POINTS:
It's only 8am but 30 sweaty degrees are trickling down my back as the high steel box with tinted windows pulls up. Wearing tramping boots with woollen socks, khaki shorts and shirt, and a fair dinkum hat, a tanned bloke bounds down from the driver's seat, shakes my hand with a grip to threaten every bone, and says, "Gidday. You must be the joker that's comin' up Cape York with us?"
Because I didn't want the 1000km trip from Cairns to the tip of Cape York to become a driving odyssey with dire consequences, I went with Wilderness Challenge. And this is our driver — Tim Daniel. Well, ex-Major Tim Daniel, whose career included three years' commanding the Australian Army Survival School. Jackpot! Because when you're being led through a wilderness as vast, isolated and unforgiving as Cape York, you don't want to be led by a sissy.
These tours operate only during the dry season, thereby avoiding being swept to your death by flooded rivers during the wet. Rod, a Cairns resident travelling with his family on this trip, tells me, "Ah, mate, it rains so hard in Cairns during the wet you can't hear the tele above the racket of the rain on the roof. Mind you, you can't hear the kids fightin', either." We don't hear a peep out of them until a teenager catches a 10kg barramundi at Punsand Bay when he lovingly repeats, "But Jeez! Just look at the size of eet!"
At the Daintree River in the Daintree National Park I took an early morning cruise with naturalist, Chris Dahlberg, who explains, "Crocodiles feel the heat, too, and just want shade and water by the middle of the day." But we are looking for birds and with nothing more than a flap of wings, a splash of colour, a chirp or a gurgle, this ornithological encyclopedia identifies our feathered friends faster than we can say, "what was that?" Whatever we ask, he has the answer.
As we rise over the range on the Bloomfield Track, a controversial road pushed through pristine rainforest so people like me can go, "Wow," when we see the meeting of the world-heritage-listed rainforest, all bristling green, and the world-heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, all cool blue.
I dig my toes into the hot, white, squeaky, sand separating the two before arriving in Cooktown, where an over-ripe mango has a go at me but fell off the tree a nanosecond too soon, exploding at my feet. This place could be called Mangotown or Colour-splattered Parrot Town, but this is where Cook repaired the Endeavour after the Great Barrier Reef had a go at it, so it's Cooktown. Cook's lack of imagination excelled itself by naming the whole cape, which is as British as a didgeridoo, after the Duke of York.
"Do you know how Laura got its name?" I ask a couple of cowboys at Laura's green corrugated-iron pub. These guys are wearing hats with brims as wide as the veranda, woollen shirts with the arms ripped off at the shoulder, boots with jangling spurs, and they've both got one fist resting on their waist and a beer in the other. "Nah, mate, we don't."
Outside another 20 locals, or 20 per cent of Laura, are trying to watch the finals of the Australian rugby league season on television but the sunlight is so bright it's hard to see anything on the screen. They're cheating the afternoon heat by sitting in the shade of a 10m-tall mango tree — but I'm not going to fall for that one.
Under the veranda, I get chatting with Bob, a man with a cheeky boy's face. With skin like the land and a voice like a camp fire, he lets me in on his philosophy: "Treat everybody as a friend, that's the only way to go, I reckon."
He has just finished working for a beef farmer who owed him $10,000 in back pay when, "the bloody farm goes down the dunny. All I got was four packets of tabacca and two tins of jam and a tin of syrup for me bread."
When I ask the bartender what Bob drinks, he thunders: "Bob bloody Miller? Oh, he doesn't drink any more, mate,"... "he guzzles!" The bar breaks into raspy laughter. Bob's still treating me as a long-lost friend as we head off to the Lakefield National Park, the largest of 20 national parks that consume 12 per cent of Cape York.
We see wompoos, Australian bustards, the Papuan frogmouths, the speckled drongos and my favourite, the Jesus birds. Officially, it's the jacana. But its disproportionately large feet carries it over semi-submerged water lilies, making it appear to walk on water.
Driver Tim is like a hawk. We're bouncing along when he points to a distant tree, declaring, "There's a pair of palm cockatoos." And so there is. Now he's telling us about the surrounding bush tucker: fruits, berries, roots, which taste like they look.
We pull up on the other side of nowhere, leave our air-conditioned comfort and walk, like two other blokes did last century, through this scrub. One of them buried the other and engraved on a wooden marker, John Reeves died 1883. It is so hopelessly remote here, even his grave wasn't found until 1998, 115 years after his death.
The descendants of those who braved such conditions are dotted throughout the cape. At Coen, a village where the police still have a horse paddock and the pub is called the Sexchange Hotel, I visit Irene Taylor, an 80-something-year-old woman who operates a guesthouse in her converted childhood home with her daughter.
I comment on the enormous bougainvillea we're walking under, that has a trunk the size of a kauri. She says, "Oh, that. Have to prune it every wet with a chain-saw. My grandfather planted that when he arrived in 1891. He was a hard-working man and he built a crushing mill for gold miners on the river over there. Then my father, he was called Samuel Thompson, he was a telegraph station manager down at Musgrave and was shot by one of the jokers who worked for him. He's buried under the large mango tree."
She pours me a cool water, shows off an orchid, her favourite flower, and invites me to Coen's annual horse race meeting in July, saying: "It's one of the Cape's major social occasions. People come from all over."
As the sun was setting, we meet a push-bike rider a few kilometres past dreamtime. He's towing a little trailer and is accompanied by a panting dog. He introduces himself as Klaus, his dog is Abbi. He tells me: "I tried sailing but I kept hitting reefs, so I swapped the boat for a bike. I've been riding it for two years now. Covered 23,000km, I reckon." He used to have another dog but it died, then this dog started following him and stayed.
Klaus is covered in dust, his hat and clothes are filthy and his smile is broad but he doesn't like to hang around people too long. I watch his back as he peddles away with Abbi running by his side, panting.
Somerset, just short of the tip, is where epic journeys like Frank and Alec Jardine's cattle drive are encrusted on this landscape. The two, aged 20 and 22 left Rockhampton, to travel a distance greater than the length of New Zealand, in May 1864 with eight men, 42 horses, and 250 cattle. They survived heat, hunger, flooded rivers and attacks by Aborigines to arrive at Somerset 10 months later, in March 1865, less 27 horses and 50 cattle. Some were eaten by crocodiles and some were eaten by the men.
When they got here, Somerset had a magistrate's house, police quarters, customs house, hospital and barracks for 20 men. By the time I arrive, there's nothing but a rusty bathtub, large mango trees, and heat and hunger hanging on a hot, dry wind.
Standing on the tip of the cape, I know from the spirits of those who walked this land in dreamtime, who painted art on rock, who erected the telegraph wire, who died nowhere, that this is no place for a sissy.
Quinkan Research
NEAR Laura, Cape York, on a hot dusty day in the 1950s, a road-gang stumbled on three rock-art galleries. Percy Trezise, then a commercial pilot, told me, "I just knew there would be more." He was right, locating and documenting most of the dozens found since, but added, "If I knew I'd be at it 30 years later, I would never have started."
The art features giant figures known as Quinkans, legendary spirits living in rock cracks, coming out to frighten people and to make sure they behave. Taipan Elder Tommy George says, "They were put there in the dreaming."
Trezise died last year, as a Member of the Order of Australia and with an honorary doctorate of letters from Queensland's James Cook University, 82 years old, and a legend. I went to visit him a few years ago at his house in the area called Quinkan, around Laura.
It is broken country with sharp rocky escarpments, valleys, savannah woodlands, tracks impassable in the wet and, even in the dry, we have to winch our four-wheel-drive jeep out of unavoidable ruts.
His homestead was in a bush clearing. He welcomed us in as he finished rolling a pile of cigarettes.
I had come to talk rock art, but he had other thoughts.
He explained why the Gulf of Carpentaria was once a lake, why global warming is a 125,000-year cycle and, stabbing his finger at an old map, declared emphatically, "and that is how humans arrived in Australia not just a few thousand years ago — but at least one million years ago".
He moved on, almost reluctantly, to rock art. "I don't do much research any more. I've really handed it all over to the James Cook University down in Cairns."
As a commercial pilot based in Cairns in the early 60s, he would fly seven days to get three days off for research. In those days, it took a full day to drive here from Cairns. "I'd spend the next day on the job and return to Cairns on the third day. It became a bit of an
obsession, really." His book, Dreamworld, published in 1993, is the definitive work on Quinkan art.
He also wrote and illustrated children's books on Aboriginal legends and beliefs, "It's important the next generation has a better understanding of these things."
As we were about to leave at night fall, he picked up his .303 rifle to shoot four fruit bats, saying, "I seem to have made friends with two or three wild dingoes that hang around here. I give them a feed most days. One of them even sleeps on my bed at night."
TRAVEL NOTES
Getting there
Qantas offers daily connections to Cairns via Sydney and Brisbane.
More Information
Cape York is one of the world's great wilderness areas. The area is about 140,000sq km, more than 11 times the size of Northland. The coastline is 1800km, largely untouched.
The varied habitat hosts half of Australia's bird species, one third of its mammals, and a quarter of its frog and reptile species.
Tropical rainforest, most of which has never been cleared or logged, accounts for 20 per cent of Australia's total. 223 species of butterflies make up 57 per cent of Australia's total.
Useful websites
www.wilderness-challenge.com.au,
www.adventures.com.au,
www.queensland-holidays.co.nz,
www.australia.com.
Booking
Contact your nearest Aussie Specialist Premier Agent on 0800 151 085 or talk to your local travel agent.
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