Australia is home to Uluru, the world’s largest monolith and named by white settlers as Ayers Rock, planted squarely in the continent’s center, where 35 percent of all the land is effectively desert. Alice Springs, the closest town, is almost three hundred miles away and a five-hour drive through the Outback, where the second most common fatality to drivers, after heat exhaustion, is a collision with a kangaroo or a camel. The continent-cum-country is largely sparse and uninhabited by people, but is home to 5,700 different animal species, 80 percent found nowhere else in the world. Scientists aren’t sure whether there are 100,000 different insect species, or twice that number, but odds are good that many are fatal, because Australia has more things that will kill you than anywhere else on the planet. Ten of the world’s deadliest snakes live here, and five of the most lethal creatures in the world—the inland taipan (the most venomous land snake on the planet), the Belcher’s sea snake (one hundred times more toxic than the taipan), the cone snail, the box jellyfish, and the blue-ringed octopus—reside in the northeast state of Queensland, where we begin our visit.
There are two significant natural wonders to see in this corner of Australia, and a man named John will show us one of them this morning. He is a local Aboriginal guide in the Daintree Rainforest, the world’s oldest at some 135 million years.
“My childhood home is just down the street here,” he says after we walk through the entrance to the national park. “I went to school a few kilometers away with all my cousins and siblings, and my grandparents’ grandparents lived in the same village where I still live.”
John is about fifty years old, stocky, with thick hair; he is wearing khaki shorts, a polo shirt, and hiking boots. I’m mildly disappointed he’s wearing Western clothes instead of native Aboriginal attire, then kick myself for even having that thought.
Our kids are entranced by him and his cheerful disposition. “Kids, kids, come over here, and we’ll first walk around the campfire three times before entering the forest. This place is sacred territory to my people.” He is as excited as a giddy child on Christmas to introduce us to his homeland. We walk in a bungling line around the smoky fire; I cough and feel an extra trickle of sweat trace down my back. The smoke smells sweet, like earthy tea, and wafts into the trees, disappears.
John asks the kids to choose walking sticks from a nearby cluster of trees; then we gather around him for a short homily to the woods. “As we enter the forest, stay silent and listen to the trees. They have stories. They knew the dinosaurs now buried in the dirt by name.” I look to my children, and Reed, the literal one, raises a perplexed eyebrow.
“That means these trees are really old,” I whisper in his ear.
“The Daintree tells us the story of the world,” John continues. “Well, the part of the story that doesn’t involve us humans. Nowhere else in the world can you see still-living examples of all eight major stages in evolutionary history, all right next to each other. This forest, my friends, is the ultimate natural history textbook.” He closes his eyes and we watch as his antennae perk, listening to his native soil. The kids are quiet and find John mysterious, like an eccentric uncle. I bow my head, offer a quick prayer of thanks to be here.
Later, I read UNESCO’s description of the crowning of the Daintree as a World Heritage Site, verifying John’s assertion. Indeed, the age of the pteridophytes, the age of the conifers and cycads, the age of the angiosperms, the conclusion of Gondwana (the ancient supercontinent before it split into today’s continents), the origin of songbirds, the mixing of continental biota between Australian and Asian plates, the extreme effects of the Pleistocene glacial periods on tropical rain forest vegetation, and the most important living record of the history of marsupials and terrestrial vegetation—all are on display here, inhaling and exhaling together, its scent of sweet decay wafting in the air.
The land is special here; a dance of God’s divinity with dirt. We are here to witness it.
As we start our walk with John, I recognize the good fortune that I’m a lax, germs-won’t-kill-you sort of parent. Even with this child-rearing tenet, it takes all my strength here in the Daintree to resist strapping a child or two to my body with duct tape. We’re a family of hikers, of natural-water swimmers, a tribe that romps in the dirt—a walk in the woods should be innocuous enough. But this is the Daintree. It is boundless and wild.
We bend around a curve of a well-trodden path, and John points to an innocent-looking fern and says with cheer, “See that? Don’t touch it—it’ll paralyze you from the neck down.”
There are prehistoric leaves that mimic paper accordion fans; idiot fruit, the seeds of which produce a poison similar to strychnine; and six types of wild ginger, some of which provide water for desperate vagabonds while the rest contain poison. There is an innocent-looking willowy shoot waving through the breeze, about four feet out of the ground, with transparent cilia along its body.
“When I was about—oh, this guy’s age,” John said, pointing to Reed, then back to the plant, “I touched this. Nightmares and shakes every night for years. Strange ones too. To this day, about once or twice a year, that part-a my body’ll go numb for no apparent reason. Or it’ll tingle this way and that. And then that night, sure enough—psychotic dreams. Yeah. So kids—don’t go touching it.”
I glance at my six-year-old, who wouldn’t have been tempted to touch the plant ten seconds ago. John says, “Onward—this next tree’s a doozy that’ll put hair on yer back.”
I pull the three kids to me. “You guys, do not go ten feet near that plant, do you hear me? Or you will not go to college because of the inevitable medical bills and psychiatric care for which you will be forever indebted to your father and me.” This is the whispered voice I reserve for waiting in unpredictable passport control lines or visiting their great-grandma’s house-of-breakable-tchotchkes.
“But Mom,” Tate says, “the path is only a foot wide. Kinda impossible.”
“You’ll figure out a way,” I reply.