Locals sometimes describe living in the Daintree as like sitting down and listening to your antiques rot. A humid strip of coastal rainforest in Australia’s far north, the world-heritage listed region has never welcomed outsiders.
But an old row about housing development has been revived by the local authority’s decision to ban building on 450 privately owned plots.
”The community has a habit of splitting over anything,” said Hugh Spencer, an ecologist and director of the Australian Tropical Research Foundation, who has lived in the area for 16 years. ”Even people who would claim to be very green are saying: ‘This is my land, I can do what I want with it’.”
The Daintree has the highest number of endemic primitive plants in the world and may be the oldest rainforest.
It provides a home for the endangered cassowary, a giant flightless bird found only in Queensland and New Guinea.
The idiospermum, a tree found only there, is almost identical to 250m-year-old fossils of a plant thought to be the ancestor of all flowering plants.
”This has always been a place where plants and animals can hide during periods of high aridity and sea level rises, and then crawl out and recolonise when conditions become better,” Spencer said.
The environment is less forgiving to humans. The rainfall can be up to six metres (236in) a year, and the heat and humidity make furniture go mouldy. The only services laid on are a road and a phone line. Power comes from solar energy and backup diesel generators; fresh water comes from the rain and waste water goes into septic tanks.
In the early 1980s the Queensland government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen allowed residential development, despite the opposition of Douglas shire council and public protests prompting one of the great conservation battles of the decade.
It ensured that 950 blocks of land were excluded from the world heritage area, but only half of them have been built on.
The mayor of Douglas, Mike Berwick, said the council’s decision to ban any development was prompted by the growing number of people wanting to swap city life for the quiet and isolation of the Daintree.
”Go back 15 years ago and you’d see 10 planning applications a year,” he said.
”Before we voted on this it had gone up to seven applications a week, and in the past month the council has approved four clearings in endangered ecosystems.
”It’s pretty hard sitting round that table while that sort of thing’s being passed.”
The council has promised to compensate the landowners by buying the land at above the market price. – Guardian Unlimited Â