Good call. In some ways it was the high point of our trip. Our guide spoke six languages: five aboriginal languages and English. He was also fluent in two cultures. And... it's hard to put into words, exactly; he was the first person I met in Australia, one of the few people I have met anywhere, who knows where he is. Part of that is local knowledge: geology and history, where the ground water comes from and where it goes, the seasons, plants, and animals—their habits, uses, and dangers. Part of it is something deeper: a connection to the place, an understanding that goes beyond mere knowledge, of what it means to be there, to belong there.
It rubs off on you, a little. Just a little. It gave me the beginnings of a sense of where I was in the world, what was different and unique about Australia.
Digression follows...
True mammals never evolved in Australia; instead, marsupials thrived and filled the available ecological niches, supplemented by a tiny group of monotremes.
Biology SidebarMammals bear their young alive and feed them on milk. That's what makes us mammals. But the class mammalia contains three orders: true mammals (that's us), marsupials, and monotremes. Mammals are relatively self-sufficient at birth (humans are far less self-sufficient than most) and young mammals feed at the breast. Marsupials, on the other hand, give birth to tiny, almost embryonic young who must somehow make their own way to a womb-like pouch for further gestation; the pouch contains milk glands. Monotremes, on the third hand, are egg-laying animals who secrete milk onto their chests for the newly-hatched young to lap up.Marsupials spread over South America and Australia, while true mammals occupied North America, Europe, and Asia. True mammals are by far the hardiest of the three orders; when the land bridge arose at the isthmus of Panama, the large South American marsupial population headed north, while a similar population of true mammals headed south. The result was the extinction of nearly all the marsupials, with the exception of a few remnants such as the ground sloth. Fun fact: The only marsupial currently expanding its range is the possum, which is spreading, slowly, over North America. Similarly, when true mammals such as mice and rabbits were introduced into Australia they reproduced in plague numbers, easily out-breeding and out-competing the local marsupials, evading local predators, and overrunning the landscape. Yikes! Fun fact 2: True mammals include whales and dolphins. Despite their appearance, timber wolves are more closely related to whales than to marsupial wolves. The marsupials diverged from true mammals a long, long time ago, but evolution tends to come up with similar solutions to similar problems. All true mammals in Australia have been imported by humans. Consequently, Australia still has a large population of marsupials and even two species of monotreme: the echidna, a spiny anteater that looks like a small hedgehog; and the duck-billed platypus, an aquatic creature somewhat like a small beaver that lives under creek banks and hunts underwater for crayfish. |
About 60,000 years ago, when sea levels fell, Australia and New Guinea formed a common land mass, still separated from the rest of the world by a deep but relatively narrow ocean trench. With sea levels so low, there was an exposed coastal path from Africa across the mouth of what is now the Red Sea, along the shores of the Arabian peninsula, over the dry bed of the Persian Gulf, down the coast of India, and into the archipelago of Indonesia.
That's when that the first known migration of modern humans out of Africa took place, and this is the path they took. They didn't go north into the cold inland areas of Europe, Asia, or India; they followed the warm coastline east and then south, where living was easiest.
Only 62 miles of ocean separated these early humans from New Guinea and Australia. Somehow, they crossed. How remains a mystery. If they had sea-going technology back then, no trace of it survived. The inhabitants of Australia had no ocean-going canoes when Europeans encountered them 60,000 years later.
The sea levels rose again. Later human migrations out of Africa covered almost the entire globe, but the deep trench between Australia and the rest of the world was not crossed by another wave of immigrants until the British came to stay in 1778. Consequently, the aboriginal Australians have the oldest living human genotype outside of Africa.
The Australians of 60-50,000 years ago spread over the entire continent: a long circular coastline encompassing both tropical and temperate latitudes—partly coastal desert and partly coastal rainforest—backed by low mountains, many covered with rainforests on their ocean sides, and surrounding a large interior of desert and arid savannah.
Later early human migrations reached New Guinea, and some contact existed between the canoe-equipped New Guineans and the land-bound Australians, but no New Guinean migration into Australia took place, perhaps because native Australians had already occupied all of the really liveable land, and much of the marginal land.
The Australians lived primarily in small bands of 6 to 10 individuals, gathering together in clan ceremonies of 100 to 150 bands. These ritual gatherings were necessarily brief and infrequent (and therefore culturally important) because the land simply could not sustain a dense population based on hunting and gathering. Due to their widely scattered population, native Australians developed hundreds of different languages. These groups were in constant contact, however, and it was (and is) common for an aboriginal Australian to speak several native languages.
They did not develop writing, but rock art in the northeast part of the continent has been dated as 50,000 years old. The native Australians have an unbroken cultural history that exceeds any other by many thousands of years. Their tales of the dreamtime, and other parts of their law and lore, are of genuinely unknown antiquity.
Oh, and then the Europeans came. The usual story of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and strip-mall construction followed.
But it's still a nice place.
It was totally cool to walk into the rainforest naively, everything looking green and homogenous, and have it brought to life: this leaf is good for cooking meat in, and the root makes a delicious spice; this is deadly poison, even to touch--it was used on spearpoints for hunting; this seed is poison, but if you peel it, crush it, soak it overnight, dry it, soak it again, and drain it, you can grind it into flour and make a bitter bread; you can easily grind these rocks for ceremonial pigments; crush that leaf for a soapy fluid that washes the pigment off; juice from this plant stuns fish--they float to the surface, you take the one you want, and the others recover and swim away--it isn't toxic, it just uses up the oxygen temporarily--it doesn't hurt the stream; these mushrooms glow in the dark, many different colors; this zig-zag in the tree's trunk marks a trail junction--you make it by bending the sapling when it's young; this fruit is good to eat--when another bush, that looks like that one over there, but that lives on the coast, develops red berries, people on the coast know that the fruit of this plant is ripe in the rainforest--it's a kind of calendar...
It's like picking up a book without knowing anything about writing, and having someone read aloud from it. Suddenly the forest around you is overflowing with information, more than you can absorb.
Not to be missed.
On the way back to Port Douglas, we detoured to the banks of the Daintree River, at the End of the Road, where we were treated to some outstanding birdwatching. We took an hour's boat ride up the river in an almost silent electric boat, in which we crept up on freshwater crocodiles, azure kingfishers, and a collared sparrow hawk, the latter two so beautiful that their images are permanently burned into my brain.
As we drove "home" to Port Douglas in the twilight, we saw sacred kingfishers and kookaburas perched on seemingly every power line. Life gives you only a handful of days like this...
Next: Rainforest and Waterfalls