The Daintree: Ecology and History

"One of the most magical experiences of my life" renowned British naturalist Sir David Attenborough said of his time in the Daintree. It is "a living museum".

In fact, the Daintree forests are more ancient than any others worldwide and hold vital clues to the origins and evolution of the world's first flowering plants. Of the nineteen families of primitive flowering plants, thirteen are represented in the Daintree. And while the entire range of flowering plants native to either Europe or North America number around 250 species, it is common to find this same diversity in just one hectare of undisturbed Daintree rainforest.

It is believed flowering plants originated between 100 and 110 million years ago in the South American and African sections of the massive super-continent Gondwana and spread from there to the other sectors which included Australia, Antarctica, India and Madagascar. By the time Gondwana had fragmented into the continents which exist today (approx 50 million years ago) flowering plants had spread to all sectors and from them into North America, Europe and Asia (previously joined in the super-continent Laurasia).

The climate worldwide began to cool with the onset of the most recent Ice Ages and, as a consequence, much of the original Gondwana flora became extinct. Australia, on the other hand, was rafting northwards into the tropics maintaining the warmer conditions required for the survival of moist tropical rainforests. This situation did not last, however, and as the Pleistocene Ice Ages took hold, Australia was transformed gradually from a continent dominated by moist forests and inland seas to the drier landscape we are familiar with today. Only in tropical North Queensland did the Gondwana flora continue to flourish and while the Daintree rainforest is not large (approx. 1,200 sq. km.) it represents the largest continuous tract of tropical rainforest with the highest percentage of 'primitive' angiosperms in the world. The Daintree coastline is also the only place in the world where the world's two most complex ecosystems (the Great Barrier Reef and lowland tropical rainforest) meet.

Named after English geologist and Agent-General Richard Daintree, the Daintree's difficult and inaccessible terrain has made it difficult to document many of it's ecological secrets but has also saved much of it from exploitation by early timber cutters and sugarcane farming which began in the Mossman district (30 kilometres to the south) in the early 1870's. Also threatened by early white settlement, the culture of the original aboriginal inhabitants of the Daintree - the Kuku-yalanji - has survived in a number of local communities based at Mossman, Laura, Bloomfield River and Cooktown.

The nomination and acceptance of the entire Wet Tropics region including the Daintree national park for World Heritage listing in 1988 has finally preserved the Daintree for future generations and while visitor numbers have grown from around 60 a day in 1980 to over 250,000 in the late 1990's, much of the Daintree remains a wilderness area. In the words of the local Aborigines the Daintree is " The Dreamtime that never awoke".