Before the Bulldozers

Somewhere north of Cape Tribulation, I was walking along a narrow track through the rainforest. Within a few months, bulldozers would be pushing a road through much of this country, opening a route to Bloomfield that would become the centre of one of Queensland's most bitter environmental disputes.

For the moment, there was little indication of what was coming.

The forest closed around the track, its canopy filtering the sunlight into scattered patches on the ground. Great trees rose above the surrounding vegetation, their buttress roots spreading across the forest floor. Vines hung from branches high overhead, while ferns and climbing palms crowded the spaces between the trunks.

I stopped frequently, drawn by some small movement or an unfamiliar plant. In places, the track was barely distinguishable from the surrounding forest. Wild pigs had disturbed patches of earth, and occasionally I found the broad, three-toed impressions of cassowaries in the mud.

I had spent years working with wildlife and exploring Australian landscapes, but there was something about the Daintree that held my attention. The richness of its vegetation, the density of life beneath the canopy and the sheer age of the forest were difficult to comprehend.

I tried to imagine a bulldozer forcing its way through the trees.

It was an uncomfortable thought, standing among trees that had grown undisturbed for so long. Yet the decision to build the road had been made, and the machinery would eventually come.

I had arrived in the Daintree almost by chance.

Four months of Environfest had left me exhausted. The arguments, negotiations, court case and endless demands of organising such an ambitious undertaking had taken more out of me than I had expected. By the time it was over, I was drained physically and emotionally, and wanted nothing more than to escape Brisbane for a while.

When life became too crowded, I usually walked.

This time I headed north.

I wasn't looking for another environmental cause. In fact, the thought of becoming involved in another campaign was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to spend time in the rainforest, explore somewhere unfamiliar and enjoy the freedom of having no particular responsibilities.

But the Daintree was already becoming the focus of another environmental struggle.

The Douglas Shire Council, supported by the Queensland Government, intended to complete a road linking Cape Tribulation with Bloomfield. To its supporters, the missing connection represented improved access, opportunities for tourism and economic development, and an end to the isolation of communities further north.

Conservationists saw something quite different.

The proposed route would cut through an exceptional stretch of tropical rainforest, much of it still relatively inaccessible. The concern was not simply the trees that would be removed to make way for the road, but what would follow. Once vehicles could move through the forest, further clearing, subdivision and settlement would become much easier.

I understood those arguments. Roads had a habit of changing the country around them, often in ways that were difficult to reverse.

Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen was not inclined to tolerate organised opposition. Conservationists, students and people choosing alternative lifestyles had often encountered hostility when they challenged government decisions. The memory of the 1976 Cedar Bay police raid, when officers destroyed the homes of an isolated alternative community further north, remained part of that political landscape.

Now another confrontation was developing, this time over the rainforest itself.

In the Daintree community, residents and conservationists were already discussing what might happen when the council sent in the machinery. Some feared the loss of rainforest. Others were concerned about the changes that greater access and development would bring to the lives they had established there.

I listened with interest but remained an observer. After Environfest, I had no desire to join another committee or take responsibility for another campaign.

I had come to walk.

And once I entered the rainforest, the political arguments seemed a long way away.

The track north towards Bloomfield passed through country of remarkable complexity. Beneath the tallest trees were smaller layers of vegetation, each finding its place according to the available light. Climbing plants used larger trees to reach the canopy, while ferns and seedlings occupied small openings below.

There was no need to hurry. I could stop wherever something caught my attention, follow an unfamiliar sound or stand beneath a tree and look upwards into branches I could barely see.

Despite my years studying wildlife, much of what surrounded me remained unfamiliar. I found that immensely appealing. There was always something more to notice, another question to consider, without any particular need to find an answer.

By late afternoon, I reached Noah Beach.

The rainforest came almost to the sand, opening onto a long, quiet stretch of coastline. I made camp beneath the trees and wandered towards the water.

It was there that I noticed something peculiar.

Scattered across the beach were hundreds of tiny round balls. From a distance, they looked like marbles, although there were far too many of them, and they seemed to be arranged in curious patterns.

I walked closer and crouched to examine them.

The balls were made of sand, each remarkably uniform in shape. They spread outward in delicate lines and clusters from small holes in the beach, sometimes forming intricate radiating patterns.

At first, I couldn't understand what had produced them.

Then, beside one of the balls something moved.

A tiny crab, scarcely larger than my fingernail, darted across the sand and disappeared down its burrow.

I remained still and watched.

After a while, other crabs began to emerge. They moved rapidly across the surface, gathering sand into their mouthparts, extracting microscopic particles of food and discarding the remaining grains as little pellets.

These were sand bubbler crabs, and the patterns I had mistaken for scattered marbles were the result of their feeding.

I was fascinated.

Each crab was working the sand around its burrow, leaving behind a record of where it had been. Across the beach, hundreds of these small creatures were engaged in the same activity, creating elaborate patterns that would disappear with the next incoming tide.

I spent some time watching them before returning to camp.

It was a small discovery, but the sort that had drawn me towards natural history since childhood. Something initially inexplicable becoming understandable through closer observation.

The following morning, I resumed my walk north.

The forest gradually enclosed the track again. There were dry creek beds to cross, fallen trees to negotiate and long stretches where I saw no one.

I had been assured that water would be available along the route.

It wasn't.

By the time I reached Cowie Beach, I had run out, and the heat was beginning to affect me. I was badly dehydrated when I noticed a faint column of smoke rising above the forest.

Following it led me to a small clearing and two people who had made their home there.

Their names were Rowan and Willow.

They gave me water and invited me to stay.

The circumstances of that meeting form part of my memoir, but another aspect of those days has remained with me: the life they had established in the rainforest, and how uncertain its future had become.

Two small timber shelters stood beneath tall palms. Solar panels caught what sunlight reached through the canopy, rainwater tanks supplied their water, and a vegetable garden provided some of their food. Chickens wandered through the clearing.

Nothing was elaborate. The arrangements were practical, shaped by the demands of living so far from conventional services.

Rowan attended to repairs and the everyday maintenance of their home, while Willow spent time tending the garden. They seemed comfortable with the routines of a life that required considerable independence.

I stayed with them for four days.

Mornings often began with tea at the edge of the clearing while sunlight gradually reached the tops of the palms. Sometimes I helped with small tasks. At other times I was content to sit and watch the forest.

After Environfest, I found the absence of urgency particularly welcome.

What struck me was how much of their lives depended on the small clearing and the forest around it. Water had to be collected, power generated, food grown and repairs undertaken with whatever materials were available. Neither appeared to regard these things as particularly remarkable. They were simply part of the life they had chosen.

And it was a life they might soon lose.

We talked about the proposed road and the protests that were expected to follow. Rowan and Willow had more reason than most to be concerned. Their home lay in country that was about to be opened to vehicles and development, and there was a possibility they might be forced to leave.

For people organising the protests, the road was an environmental and political issue. For Rowan and Willow, it was also about their home.

I could understand why they had chosen to live there. Their clearing offered a degree of independence that would have been difficult to find elsewhere. The forest was not somewhere they visited occasionally. It surrounded their daily lives.

Yet the approaching confrontation had not brought their routines to a halt.

There was something unsettling in that contrast. Beyond their clearing, decisions were being made that could change everything around them. Here, the ordinary work of living continued.

I wondered what would become of their small home when the machinery arrived.

The country through which I had walked also had a much older human history.

The Eastern Kuku Yalanji people had lived with the rainforest for countless generations, using routes through the mountains and along the coast long before Europeans arrived. Parts of the proposed road would follow those established pathways.

I had little direct contact with the Traditional Owners during my visit, and my understanding of their circumstances was limited. Only later did I appreciate more fully how much of the public argument over the rainforest had been conducted between conservationists, settlers and government authorities, while the people with the oldest connection to the country received far less attention.

Eventually, I said goodbye to Rowan and Willow and made my way south.

When I left the Daintree, the bulldozers had not yet arrived.

A few months later, the confrontation began.

In November 1983, local conservationists began organising a blockade of the proposed road. When the council's machinery arrived in December, protesters attempted to prevent construction from proceeding.

Police were called in to clear the way. Arrests followed, and the bulldozers began pushing into the forest.

As news spread, environmental activists travelled north, bringing techniques developed during earlier campaigns. Some climbed high into the rainforest canopy, securing themselves among the branches. Others occupied holes dug in the path of the machinery, making it difficult for operators to proceed without endangering them.

The confrontations with police became increasingly bitter.

Heavy rain temporarily interrupted construction, offering the protesters some hope that the delay might prevent the road from being completed.

It didn't.

Work resumed in 1984. More police were deployed, more arrests followed, and the bulldozers continued through the forest.

Photographs and television reports carried the confrontation far beyond Queensland: protesters suspended in trees, people refusing to move from the path of heavy machinery, and police attempting to clear the route.

I followed the events from a distance.

It was strange to see photographs of the blockades and recognise the country I had walked through only months before. The narrow track beneath the canopy had become the focus of a confrontation involving police, protesters, government authorities and the national media.

I remembered the great trees, the dense vegetation and the quiet stretches where I had stopped to examine something along the track.

And I wondered what had happened to Rowan and Willow.

The road was completed and officially opened on 7 October 1984. The protesters had failed to prevent its construction, and the rainforest along its route had been irreversibly altered.

Yet the confrontation had consequences beyond the road itself.

The blockades and the images carried by newspapers and television helped bring the Daintree to national attention. They became part of a much larger and longer-running movement to protect the tropical rainforests of North Queensland, increasing public pressure for their conservation.

On 9 December 1988, five years after the bulldozers first arrived, the Wet Tropics of Queensland was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The road remained, but the listing contributed to stronger protection for the surrounding rainforest. Many of the concerns about extensive clearing and development would not be realised on the scale conservationists had feared.

The blockades had not begun the campaign for World Heritage protection, nor were they solely responsible for its success. But they had given the wider conservation movement a public visibility and urgency that would prove important.

In September 2021, another significant change occurred when more than 160,000 hectares of land, including Daintree National Park, were returned to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people under arrangements for joint management.

None of this was known to me when I began walking north from Cape Tribulation in 1983.

I knew there was a proposed road and that people were preparing to oppose it. I understood what construction could mean for the rainforest. But I had no sense of the scale of the confrontation that would follow, or that the country through which I was walking would soon become so closely associated with an important period in Australian conservation history.

I had gone north looking for somewhere to escape the demands of Environfest.

Instead, I had arrived at a place on the verge of profound change.

When I think of that visit now, I remember the rainforest as it was before the bulldozers. I remember the narrow track winding between the trees, the dense vegetation and the long stretches where I could walk without seeing another person.

I remember the little sand bubbler crabs at Noah Beach, emerging from their burrows and leaving delicate patterns across the sand.

And I remember Rowan and Willow, their small clearing beneath the palms, the timber shelters, the vegetable garden and the chickens wandering about.

I never learned what happened to them.

Perhaps that is what has stayed with me most. I know what happened to the road, and something of the larger conservation campaign that followed. I know that much of the surrounding rainforest eventually received protection.

But I don't know what became of the two people who gave me water when I needed it, shared their home with me for four days and then returned to a life that was about to become increasingly uncertain.

What remains is the memory of walking through that country before the machinery arrived, when the track was still narrow and the forest closed overhead.