The Mossman River
The Outback of Australia. Millions of square miles of nothing with a giant rock plunked down in the middle of it, what we used to call Ayers Rock before it reattained its rightful aboriginal designation — Uluru. The parched rock-strewn griddle of central Australia competes in size with the lower forty-eight. Huge. Unforgiving. Arid.

But it was not always so. Some many millions of years ago as the continents danced around on their tectonic plates and the oceans swelled and shrank according to how much ice-age cap sat imprisoned at the poles, central Australia was rainforest. The fossils tell us so. Of that continental jungle a tiny sliver remains, the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, the chunk of Australia occupying the corner that New England occupies for us — the Northeast.

Here down-under, North means Hot. It takes some getting used to but in actual matter of fact, to see the midday sun you look north. The sun rises in the East down here in the Southern Hemisphere, as it should, and it sets in the West, but its latitudinal significance confounds people like me who have spent their entire lives on the other side of the Equator. And so it is that this corner of Australia requires sunblock through half the year, and umbrellas through the other half. During the rainy season the mountainous terrain intercepts clouds borne westward by the trades and wrings them dry.

The Daintree Rainforest occupies .1% of Australia’s landmass, but a hugely disproportionate share of its birds and bugs and plants. Trees and bushes and lianas and flowers, including the aptly named strangling vine, engage in constant vertical competition for sunlight insuring that only the occasional vagrant beam reaches the forest floor.

The Mossman River plunges out of the Daintree’s southern edge, losing 3,440 feet in elevation over its fifteen-mile run from mountain to sea, draining a watershed of only 182 square miles. At this time of year the Mossman ambles and chuckles down its steep notch and stills itself into pools of lazy crystalline water perfect for swimming. But come January and February its volume and force swell to tumble and polish boulders the size of Volkswagens.

Day and night the birds in Mossman Gorge cackle and chirp and coo and shriek in the jungly thicket, and if you are lucky you might see one perched on a midstream rock or whizzing like a streak of light through the trees. I only got a closeup of one, the lowly bush turkey who wandered past our cabin. But I compensated by capturing a once-in-a-lifetime shot of the exceedingly rare North Queensland River Naiad.