Mossman Gorge in the Daintree

Today we took an Aboriginal-led walking tour of the Mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest. Our guide , Jarrod, showed us some of their hunting tools—for example, the boomerang, which was not used for throwing, but more for striking and breaking an animal’s leg to disable it so it would be easier to catch with a spear. In more open lands, the returning boomerang might be used for knocking birds out of the sky. Jarrod, said it’s really very hard to be in the right place when the boomerang comes down.

He also showed us how red and yellow ochre was used, along with black paste from wood ash, would be used on the body as markings to identify you as members of clans on your mother and father’s sides.

After the tour, we hiked around the gorge area on our own and saw some of the strangler trees that Jarrod had showed us. They grow up around a tree and eventually strangle the life out of it—maybe over the course of 10-20 years. It was in the hollowed out trunks of the ‘host’ tree that Jarrod’s people would wrap their dead in the bark of the paperbark tree and bury them. Now, they aren’t permitted to do that. The rainforest is thick with vegetation, and a few birds were sighted, but no tree kangaroos, as we were hoping to find.

No ice cream stop today, but a nice dinner and some stargazing back at Lync-Haven for our last night in the Daintree Rainforest.Read more