Rainforest Revelations

Posts Tagged ‘undisturbed rainforest’

You can sense the antiquity and agelessness of old-growth rainforest from the moment you step into our newly created walking trail from the exotic tropical fruit orchard.  Trees like the Yellow Walnut, (seen above) Beilschmedia bancroftii, with roots stretching close to a hundred metres, stand like massive sentinels, protecting and holding together all of the surrounding trees.  Visitors often remark, “They must have enormous tap roots.”  However, there are no tap roots under rainforest giants.  Constant rain washes the soil and the nourishment becomes caught up in a fabric of root-hairs that form a fibrous matting across the upper level of soil.

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Tassel Fern Creek is a beautiful watercourse meandering through the Gondwanan lowland rainforests within the western aspect of Cooper Creek Wilderness.  It originates deep in the north-western corner of the catchment from a low-lying series of swampy feeder creeks.   Of all the Cooper valley water courses, Tassel Fern Creek portrays the peculiar character of being the least descendant and yet, for its volume of water, would be the catchment’s fourth most abundant flow.

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The people behind the service of FNQ Apartments (from left):  Owen, Brenda, Sara & Megan
standing beneath a masterpiece of evolutionary design upon the ceiling of a pristine chapel

What a brilliant Christmas office idea -  rewarding the staff of FNQ Apartments with a shared immersion into the middle of the oldest rainforest in the world!  A brief overview of FNQ’s website reveals a specialist FNQ accommodation booking company with a strong social ethos and it was a pleasure for Cooper Creek Wilderness to host this special event.

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At the top of the cabinetwood timber industry’s wish list, the chunk of trunk in the foreground contains the equivalent of $100,000 worth of spectacular hardwood asset – Yellow Walnut (Beilschmiedia bancroftii).  Of course, under World Heritage legislation, its protection confers a potential three-year jail term for any attempt at removal.

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Pristine World Heritage Fan Palm Rainforest in the Daintree - a unique experience.

One of the most important aspects of the World Heritage inscription of the Wet Tropics of Queensland onto the United Nations register was the compulsory inclusion of freehold land.  There is no doubt that there was opposition to this controversial decision and that some landholders were never compensated for the loss of land use previously designated as primary production.

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