A trip to a property in the Daintree Rainforest offers up unexpected visitors

Sydney Morning Herald

a day ago

This story is part of the June 29 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories.
A huntsman spider, as big as any I've seen, casts a shadow across my bathroom in Far North Queensland's Heritage Lodge. It's clinging to a wall above the shower I've just stepped out of. I pray that it will stay there, but what if it doesn't? What if it makes a dash for the gap beneath the door to my bedroom during the night? What if it tickles my ears while I'm asleep?
I'm being unnecessary paranoid, I know. It's just a huntsman, after all. But I also know that dangers lurk in the Daintree Rainforest.
'This is the most ancient rainforest in the world,' says Angie Hewett, my tour host. 'It's also the most toxic – the kind of landscape you want to look at but not touch.'
Angie, and husband Neil, have hosted Daintree Rainforest tours on their 67-hectare Cooper Creek Wilderness property for 27 years. As we follow her through their backyard wilderness, she points out plants to avoid rubbing up against. There are wait-a-whiles, a climbing palm with sharp hooks that tear into bare skin, and stinging trees laced with poisons that can irritate for months. But despite the prickly, annoying hindrances, it's cassowaries that we're primarily here to see. Specifically, southern cassowaries. 'They're what we call 'keystone vectors'. They're vital for the health of the rainforest,' says Angie.
Though usually shy creatures, cassowary sightings are reasonably common at Cooper Creek, so much so that the Hewetts have become sufficiently acquainted with their resident cassowaries to name them. There's the statuesque Big Bertha, a two-metre tall female that Angie estimates to be 70 years old. Then there's mother-daughter combo, Delilah and Prudie, and a male lothario named Crinkle Cut, who's sired several batches of chicks with multiple partners.
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But the cassowaries don't roam this property alone. Other wildlife species populate the place as well. Spiders, obviously. Angie points towards a motionless lichen huntsman that's perfectly camouflaged against its mossy background. Also green tree ants, which she describes as 'dairy-farming ants' for their habit of milking sweet-tasting saps from aphids and caterpillars.
Feral pigs are a problem, though they also make tasty meals for the saltwater crocodiles patrolling the Daintree River a few kilometres back down the road. And Bennett's tree-kangaroos, more commonly found in New Guinea, leap among canopy branches where spectacled flying foxes hang upside. Already endangered, these harmless, doe-eyed fruit bats are preyed upon by dingoes and amethystine pythons. Given half a chance, the pythons will gladly snatch a cassowary chick or a Bennett's wallaby that wanders into its orbit as well. 'Human infants, too,' says Angie. 'You'd never leave a baby unattended around here.'
Despite all the blood-sucking creepy crawlies, hazardous plants and deathly animals in the Daintree, it's still a remarkably pretty and resilient place. Angie guides us past thousand-year-old yellow walnut trees, as well as leafy silky oaks and flowering satinashes that have withstood cyclones and floods. We pause between the buttress roots of a golden penda tree, where Angie and Neil exchanged their marriage vows many years earlier, then wander through an eye-catching fan palm gallery that stretches towards the heavens.