Daintree Rainforest

He's passed because he was 84 when I first met him and got to know him.

And in essence, the reason that he'd taken that trajectory in life is because when he was six years old, he was first asked by his father to join him in the Daintree rainforest to shoot Aboriginal people for sport.

So this is the 1930s.

This was being done in the 1930s.

from the soil, from the fungal networks threading through every cubic centimetre of the ground you are standing on.

You are in far north Queensland, Australia, you are in the Daintree Rainforest, and the trees above you, their lineages, their families, their deep botanical ancestry, were here before flowers existed.

that fact is worth staying with for a moment the dane tree predates the amazon by roughly one hundred and seventy million years when this forest was already ancient already complex already home to species that would not survive anywhere else The Amazon basin was still an inland sea, a wide, shallow body of water stretching across South America that would not begin to support tropical forest for another geological epoch.

The Dane tree was a forest when dinosaurs walked beneath it, not metaphorically, not in the poetic sense, in the literal, paleontological, fossilised footprint sense.

It's just also that we don't know when it's coming into effect.

Roderick Rees runs Cairns Adventure Group in Far North Queensland, taking visitors whitewater rafting and into the Daintree rainforest.

He says working holidaymakers are a crucial part of his workforce.

It's about 20% of our workforce, but coming into Christmas, it inflates right up to about 30%, 35%.

So it is an Australian conservation organization, and it focuses on protecting and restoring all of those lovely rainforest habitats.

One of its major conservation areas is in the Daintree Rainforest, obviously in Far North Queensland.

A major focus of its Daintree work is protecting that habitat for the endangered southern cassowary.

But it doesn't just protect the individual animals, it focuses on protecting the whole ecosystems that those animals depend on.

So that's really cool.

So kind of cool that the locals are moving back in.

So yeah, it just goes to show, like, how much rainforest restoration can actually do to help threatened wildlife get back to their ecosystems.

That's fucking-- That is some incredible work, especially up in the Daintree, which, which is one of the most important places in Australia to try and protect.

So over the last two weeks, we've been combining gratitude, reflections and our recent trip to far north Queensland with how we can merge that into Somatic in September, appreciate our body and how we can become totally somatic.

So over the last two weeks, we've stood beneath the ancient, beautiful trees of the Daintree Rainforest.

And then last week, we marveled at the interconnected beauty of the Great Barrier Reef.

So today, our journey is going to take us somewhere slightly different.

He's slowly taken over his patch, unfortunately.

So now Scarface has got less than a kilometre of that Daintree River left, bless his little heart.

So I wanted to share that with you, because first of all, I think it's amazing that you've just got all of this happening in this ecosystem of the Daintree Rainforest.

But also, as we went a little bit further along, We then saw a baby croc and hopefully you can see that coming up on the footage.

But as you go like further north into like Townsville and Cairns, you know, a lot less of population.

And then up into the Daintree rainforest, you know, even Sydney.

even less so.

So kind of seeing how fishes of the same species are impacted by living really close to these urban centers.

That is off the coast of Queensland in the northeast corner.

That is also where you'll find the Daintree Rainforest.

So you're hearing words like desert, outback, rainforest, reef.

Australian geography is much more diverse than you might initially think when you just think Crocodile Dundee in the outback.

I came back with an English boy and we ended up buying a... an old Land Rover, you know, one of those Leyland Brother Land Rovers and I put a bag of paint and paintbrushes and swimsuits and we travelled up the coast and I think I can remember sitting in Byron Bay car park selling crap to pay our petrol on the way up and little painted pots or something stupid like that.

I don't know what I was doing but anyway, we paid our petrol to get up here and he'd He'd had this fantasy of living in the Daintree and so I just got dragged along for the ride.

Have you heard of the Daintree

before that?

Because a lot of people I chat to just didn't even know.

Yeah.

Oh, I love it.

So now we know you for your beautiful, you know, mangrove pieces and Daintree inspired kind of work.

Actually, maybe it was in the Daintree, the other one.

We shot the Daintree rainforest is just like the most amazing place.

And in terms of, so you work a lot in editorial fashion.

There's often within these campaigns, a photographer that works alongside you.