When the film Avatar was released to critical acclaim, it was received as ground-breaking cinema. Producer James Cameron created a perfect vehicle to entice families, sci-fi enthusiasts and tree-huggers alike. It is an imaginative animated film about a paraplegic soldier who, as a computer-generated “avatar” of himself, is given back the use of his legs to infiltrate the culture of the planet of Pandora.
The soldier’s physical restoration leads to love and redemption amongst the indigenous people, living in a magical world covered in rainforest, fighting for their survival against voracious human miners. The film generated more than $2.788 billion at the box office following its release in 2009 and Cameron recently announced that four more sequels of the blockbuster were planned.
Silky Oaks Lodge – Mossman River
Now, having visited the Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland, walking and talking under its leafy green canopy with Venture Deeper guide Chris O’Dowd, the film seems much more than just fantasy. At Silky Oak Lodge on the Mossman River, a 30-minute drive north of Port Douglas, listening to Chris’s unquenchable enthusiasm for his subject has changed the way I look at trees.
The Daintree is a 1200 square kilometre biological entity, its trees and plants constantly regenerating, growing and dying, springing to life again from seed. The amazing thing is that this has been going on for up to 100 million years, dating back to when Australia was connected to Antarctica as part of the supercontinent of Gondwanaland.
Mt Demi – Daintree Rainforest
The Daintree is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area which covers 9000 square kilometres of tropical rainforest, stretching 450km along Australia’s northeast coast from Paluma Range National Park in the south to Cooktown. The Wet Tropics covers just one per cent of the continent, but contains 62 per cent of our butterfly species, 30 per cent of our marsupials, 23 per cent of our reptiles, 60 per cent of our bats, 30 per cent of our frogs and 18 per cent of all bird species in Australia.
Silky Oaks Lodge – Fig Tree Cascades
Through transpiration, the vaporisation of water from leaves into the humid air, the rainforest literally creates some of its own weather, clouds and rain. It is a living library of the evolution of Australia’s flora and fauna, a place where scientists have only just begun to skim the surface of its massive genetic catalogue.
The chemical structures of its plants are used as templates from which researchers can synthesize drug compounds. Today, more than 25 per cent of all medicines used in the Western world are plant-derived, according to the CSIRO’s Tropical Forest Research Centre in Atherton. The US National Cancer Institute says that of the 3000-odd plants it has identified as having potential anti-cancer properties, seventy per cent come from the world’s rainforests.
But the rainforest is far more than just a natural pharmacy.
Electric blue Ulysses butterflies blaze a trail of flickering iridescence through the dappled shadow and light. During a walk along the banks of the Mossman River, what look like hundreds of insects scatter before our footsteps. They are tiny frogs.
The Mossman, with a watercourse only 32km long, is the steepest river in the world. In a small pond on the riverbank, a spring bubbles up through the sand. Schools of small fish dart amongst the bubbles, eating the particles of decaying vegetable matter forced up from the forest floor. Platypus live here.
Cascades – Mossman River
In the deeper forest live green tree frogs as big as a human hand, goannas, the amethystine python which can grow up to eight metres long, and flying foxes, along with rare and endangered species including the southern cassowary, Bennett’s and Lumholtz tree kangaroos, the musky-rat kangaroo, the buff-breasted paradise kingfisher, the lesser sooty owl, Boyd’s forest dragon and the spotted-tailed quoll.
Bull Kauri – Lake Burrine – Atherton Tablelands
Giant bull kauri trees more than 1000 years old punch their way up into the canopy, reaching for the sunlight up to 45m above the forest floor. Rainforest trees 35m or taller are capable of consuming up to 800 litres of water a day during photosynthesis. Hopes cycad, one of the rainforest’s largest of this ancient species and one of its slowest growers, can live for more than 1000 years.
Chris’s passion for his subject is infectious as he explains the symbiotic relationships that exist in the Daintree. Researchers have found that when the leaves of certain plants are being eaten by insects, it prompts some plants to generate a chemical defence which acts as an insecticide, he says. Fungi underneath the forest floor, growing on plant roots, pick up the response and react in turn, passing the chemical message along the root system to “tell” other plants to produce and release their own “insecticide” to ward off the insect attack. The potential for response is not hard to imagine when you consider that around 30 different fungal species can be found on five grams of decaying rainforest leaves.
Strangler vines the girth of a man’s forearm twist up trees, festooning the forest canopy. Massive basket ferns more than six metres in diameter cling to tree trunks, their spreading fronds open wide to the passing chance of another deluge.
Silky Oaks Lodge – forest walk – fig tree
The splayed roots of fig trees, like flying buttresses of some Gothic cathedral, grip tightly to the shallow soil and stepping around them, the unwary walker must watch out for the vicious grasp of the wait-a-while palm. Also known as lawyer vine (because when it catches you it won’t let you go), it grows up to 500m long, using hooked, needle-sharp barbs to grapple the vegetation in its reach for sunlight.
For the Daintree, the bigger picture is daunting. Survival is reliant on interdependence.
The Great Barrier Reef and its shallow lagoon, under threat from agricultural run-off, shipping pollution and coastal development, stretches 2,300 kilometres down the east coast of Australia. The lagoon releases massive amounts of moisture into the humid air through evaporation. On contact with the coastal highlands which rise to the Atherton Tablelands, the air dumps its liquid load on the rainforest and the water rushes back to the coast in rivers like the Mossman and Daintree, flushing vital organic nutrients into the tidal estuaries and mangrove forests, maintaining the nurseries which nurture marine creatures including barramundi, mackerel, mullet, whiting, mud crabs and tiger prawns.
Silky Oaks Lodge – Tree House Accommodation
These sea creatures don’t just feed humans. The Daintree feeds the mangroves, the marine offspring feed the Great Barrier Reef, which in turn waters the rainforest. Damage one entity and the others suffer.
When the British Raj assumed rule in India in the mid-1800s, colonials returned home with a new word to describe the landscape through which they hacked and trekked. The word “jungle” comes from the Hindi language and means “chaotic wilderness”. It’s an inappropriate definition for the extraordinary, interlinked biological entity which is a rainforest.
The word “avatar” also derives from Hindi. It’s the name given to the earthly form of a supernatural being or deity which has descended from heaven.
Ulysses Butterfly
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe it’s the rainforest which is the “avatar”…
Photo Credits
Bull Kauri – Lake Burrine – Atherton Tablelands by Vincent Ross – All Rights Reserved
Silky Oaks Lodge – Fig Tree Cascades by Vincent Ross – All Rights Reserved
Silky Oaks Lodge – Tree House Accommodation by Vincent Ross – All Rights Reserved
Ulysses Butterfly – Wikimedia Creative Commons
All other photos courtesy Silky Oaks Lodge
Recent Vincent Ross Articles:
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- Water for Elegance - One Man’s Dream
- Transported to Devils’ Island - Part 2
- Transported to Devils’ Island - Part 1
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