In yet another (not terribly arduous) struggle of being British in Australia, I am often disorientated by a common pronunciation of this far north Queensland town and assume the Australian speaker has moved the conversation on to the French town of an independent film festival.
I don’t know how many of them are looking at me askance when I persevere in mind of a piled stone way-marker, perhaps because down here I’m untroubled by the facial expressions that may be occurring high up in the stratosphere which are no concern of mine.
Maybe it’s just a Queensland thing.
However the hell you pronounce it, this part of Australia is a pretty bloody amazing place. Salivating on the memory, I am currently in a Ken Behrens (UK – google this …) lockdown, enjoying a bit of late morning sun from the balcony and admiring the austere sides of black mountain with its cloak folds of grey-green eucalypt. Vivid yellow wattle competes with the blue of the sky to challenge the high country note of frost in the air. As winter races towards spring, the mournful cry of a raven keeps me in European thoughts: seasons, the gothic and the now-familiar: dryness, drought, fire. Queensland is tropical and it’s utterly disorientating.
Flying to Cairns/Cannes is worth the ticket just for the view. Screw paying for helicopter flights, just pay attention before you land. There are vine drenched mountains in lovely peaks like whipped meringues that glow purple-green against a blue sky and sea. It all sparkles like it’s been glittered for the occasion and is just like those pictures of paradise a girl from Essex would stare at, never imaging she would really one day see.
We hired a car, got Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds blaring like two respectable road trippers should, and set off. Our route was north to Port Douglas for two nights including a cultural crab-fishing tour on Cooya/Kuya Kuya Beach, a stroll around Mossman Gorge, bird spotting on the Daintree River, up to Cape Tribulation, then back south to Cairns to hop aboard with Coral Sea Dreaming for a day and overnight of snorkelling at Milln Reef on old Great Barrier. And singing la-la-la-lai, a-la-la-la-lai, we were off on another round of croc dodging!
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‘You know vegetarian is an aboriginal word, right?’
Brandon is looking at me devilishly. I sense a trap.
‘No?’
‘Yup – it means really bad hunter.’
Yeah, fair. But I don’t know how he does it. Brandon Walker and his brother Linc have run Kuku Yalanji Cultural Habitat Tours since 1999, taking people out onto the mudflats to share traditional hunting and cultural practices. He said his grandparents taught him to hunt crabs on the mudflats of Cooya Beach from the age of five. They’d grab me by the ear, he said, tell me to look there, look there, and twist, he said. He learned pretty quick. But when he points out to me the serrated curve in the sand under two inches of water, I reckon I could have walked over it a hundred times and never known a blue swimmer was hiding under the sand. Poke it, he says. I heft my little spear and prod, uncertainly. Ooh, it didn’t like it. The outline suddenly swells three times its size under the sand as it spreads its pincers. Shit. Go on, stab it, Brandon urges. I do it quickly before the bugger can think about it. It was a good hit, I got it through and with a pretty impressive perspective angle, the photo looks like the crab’s half my body size. It wasn’t, but still, I killed it and ate it. I’m not vegetarian, and so much for finding the whole experience confronting, coz I fucking sure showed that crab.
This was my triumph of the day but spending the morning walking along the silver mudflats was good enough on its own. The sky was thinly clouded, and the air was warm and balmy without being fierce. There were so many starfish I could barely avoid treading on them, and memorably, a bull-ray swum right into my shins as I waded through the water.
Just remember I killed that crab. Don’t think about the yelping and shrieking I did, then.
Brandon impressed us all again when he threw a spear into opaque water while accounting for refraction and got the ray in its right wing. He removed the poisoned spar from its tail and threw the little fellow back into the water where it swam away to … heal. He promised. He also promised that the 5m croc that lives over in that estuary and the 4m croc that lives in that other river mouth won’t come onto the mudflats while the tide’s out. Righto.
We collected periwinkles and wirrells for eating and pulled black pearl oysters off the mangrove roots which we shucked and sucked then and there. We ate hibiscus flowers for their quenching flavour, and he showed us how to squeeze drops from the white berries of beach cabbage into our eyes to soothe soreness. We fell over little soldier crabs and held puffer fish in our hands and saw the marks left by dugongs with their young. Brandon told us about his grandfather from the stolen generation; how he was taken from his family but escaped and ran back to his mountains and forests and beaches; how his grandmother was carried right past the officials in a dilly bag; how he has lots of children because his grandfather impressed upon him the notion that ‘they’re trying to kill us all. Spread.’ He told us about travelling around the world, getting up to capers in Manchester, playing professional rugby, playing rhythm guitar and how to tell the weather by looking at the cloud on the mountain. It must be so wonderful to know this is your home, you belong here, I wondered. He smiled. I can just about bear it, he said.
After about two and a half hours it was time to go – but no it wasn’t, because he took us to his folks’ house over the road and cooked all that good stuff up with a brick of butter and intensified garlic and chili marinades. We slurped it all up with deLICious fresh damper, chucking the shells into the bucket between our legs, while Brandon made us jewellery from the wirrell shells we’d collected. He was a legend, his family were lovely, and it was pretty much the Best Day Ever.
After this we went to ‘Wildlife Habitat’ in Port Douglas (it’s a zoo, it’s just a zoo) and I nearly passed out with excitement when we entered a room filled with free-flying birds. I could have stayed there forever dodging wood swallows, finches, and doves while staring at little quails and the bush stone curlew, but the best little chap was a cockatiel who came and sat on my shoulder for about 20 minutes. Wandering around we also saw cassowaries, eclectus parrots, royal spoonbills, lorikeets and black cockatoos. Yup, lost my mind.