To Boldly Go Where People Have Been for Over 40,000 Years
A walk through Daintree National Park last week reminded me how little I know about the natural world. Ditto a scuba dive along the Great Barrier Reef the day before. In Daintree I recognised one spider (a golden orb web) and quite a few butterflies (cruisers, birdwings, green-banded blues, bluebottles, the sudden flinty blue sparks of a Ulysses). At the Great Barrier Reef, I could identify a clownfish, a sea cucumber, a turtle, a pod of dolphins, little else.
In other words, out of the abundance of life I witnessed on land and sea, I was familiar with about .00001% of it.
In the tropical rainforest, a life form that proved most mysterious was one of the most obvious and abundant — trees. What are jungles but compositions of tree life? They’re everywhere you look.
In my last post I talked about hurling through time and watching the Great Barrier Reef shape-shift and sparkle over tens of thousands of years, before, alas, the sudden white-out of our own brief era. If that same time machine were placed amongst the Daintree National Park, the trees would come alive. We’d see them swishing their roots around, like giant fins or flippers cutting through the surface soil, beached behemoths, scooping up the leaf litter. Some of their roots, like lengthy tentacles, would slither upwards, spiralling around trunks, pulling down their neighbours. Trees feeding on trees.
There are roughly 3000 plant species at Daintree. I couldn’t identify a single one.
In some parts of the Mossman jungle, placards were in place, faded slightly, describing the trees and their inhabitants. I read a couple. This isn’t my place. I was raised amongst redwoods and oak. As much as I might want to, I don’t live in Daintree. My connection is infrequent, ephemeral, touristy.
So how does one make a connection to such a place?
Suppose I had a phone — or one of those trichorders from Star Trek — that when I pointed it at a plant, it could tell me the species and give me information about it. Kind of like the faded placards at Mossman, but it would be with me all the time, at my beck and call, with a wealth of information about anything I pointed it at. It could tell me the specimen’s rarity; when it’s expected to flower. Maybe I could ask it questions (“Trixby, what insects will I find on this fella?”). It’s a delightful concept, and would have suited me well at Daintree last week.
But part of why the tricorder works so well in Star Trek is that the Enterprise crew are finding new worlds, places no one else on the ship has visited. “To boldly go where no one else has gone before.” If a crew member had been to the planet before — Vulcan, Romulan, Klingon — they usually deferred to this person’s knowledge. I mean (skip this sentence if you’re not a Trekkie), what would they know about the planet Bajor without the expertise of Bajoran Ensign, Ro Lauren?
Daintree has been inhabited by humans for tens of thousands of years. I’m no newcomer; I’m a guest. If I want to really connect to Daintree, there are people who have the knowledge, who know the answers to some of my questions, but who could also tell me things I might not think of asking. There’s something about meeting a resident that gives us a special insight to a place. The only problem is, where to find them? I don’t know who they are. Perhaps I could hire one as a guide, but surely modern technology, connecting billions of people, can do better than this.
Interestingly, on the way through Mossman the bus passes an Aboriginal village. A sign at the bus stop alerts visitors to this fact. “Please be respectful,” it says. My teenage son was intrigued by this news. The idea of an “Aboriginal village” brought up romantic images of antiquity in his mind — just like it would for most young Australians. Idyllic pictures from adventure stories and history books. But he was, as most young people in Australia would be, surprised by the “modernity” of the place. The driveways, cars, satellite dishes, basketball courts.
I, older but only slightly wiser, was surprised on the other hand by its austerity. Compared to the mega-mansions of Port Douglas, this was a trailer park. Discarded appliances rusting away behind chain-link fences. What was the economic situation of this place? Was it government-subsidised? What opportunities did it afford? How did the people spend their time? Was it a unique, self-sustaining community like the people who live on the Hawaiian island of Nihau? Isolated, bizarre in a way, but with its own allure (listen to this great podcast about Nihau on “This American Life”)? Or was it like so many other Australian backwater towns, with the exception that it happened to be nested in the jungle of Mossman Gorge?
Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry of Mossman Gorge makes no mention of this village and its community. Nor does it appear on Google maps (you can see it on terrain view). It’s as if the Gorge is a place where we discover nature, and this nature doesn’t include humans. Maybe the visitors don’t want it to? Maybe the visitors want to go where no one else has gone before; to the pristine and romantic, to a place we can discover for ourselves.
But something tells me, if we want to feel a connection to the plant life of Daintree, no number of placards or survey drones, or the largest field guide, or the smartest smartphone, or the most advanced trichorder, will give us that connection. Perhaps this connection requires meeting the people who’ve been there longest or know more about it than anyone else.
