"Take a patch of coastline and its hinterland, put it just north of twenty and one hundred and forty-six east, make it hot and wet and sprinkle it with people who feel they've been forgotten by the rest of the country - and don't really care. Where there aren't hills and unswimmable water, plant cane. There's this largish place called Reeftown on the coast and in the purple hills behind there are smaller towns that grow tobacco and maize and stories that ripen and wither and repeat themselves as cautions against being human. Human! Ah! There's the rub! It's not the dreaming that matters, as the poet insisted. He couldn't have been more wrong. It's the reality that rubs. And rubs. And rubs.
Everything is very green here. Very blue and very green, and the depth of its coloration whacks out this response, not only from me but from the rest of us, who, having chosen, ripen and wither and repeat ourselves in stories. Which are re-lived by others. Over. Over. Maybe it's only a second-rate Eden with its rain-forest and waterfalls, its mountain-climbing burrower of a railway and a sea-bitten rind of coast - a kind of limbo for those who've lost direction and have pitched a last-stand tent."
So begins Thea Astley's book Hunting the Wild Pineapple, in which she describes what is quite obviously the little rain-forest village of Kuranda and the Atherton Tablelands. And, of course, "Reeftown" is Cairns and the "mountain-climbing burrower of a railway" is the scenic Cairns-to-Kuranda trainride.
Thea Astley's description dates back to the 70s when Kuranda attracted hundreds of alternative-lifestyle drop-outs. Then the place was awash with unwashed people with no regular employment who in their desperate search for work had been to every surf-spot on the eastern seaboard before settling at Kuranda which was sufficiently remote for work demands never to be made. They'd spent their time watching the sun come up in the morning and tracking its progress all day across the sky while twanging their out-of-tune guitars. Each fortnight, responding like children trained by the Jesuits to the vestiges of ritual, they would hike in to Cairns to pick up their dole cheques.
The few survivors of that era give Kuranda a certain bohemian feel even today although it is mainly a tourist destination now. For three hours each day it is mayhem with tourists coming in by the thousand on coaches, on the "mountain-climbing burrower of a railway", and on the skyrail cablecar. The heart of town becomes a hive of activity with markets, restaurants, shopping and wildlife parks and then, all of a sudden everyone leaves and the place looks like the final reel of "On the Beach."
Over the past ten years I have visited Kuranda several times and even toyed with the idea of settling there - if I ever sold up down here. It's a beautiful part of the world, tucked away in its small pocket of rain-forest, with the tropical coastline just a short drive down the range and the lush and green Tablelands spreading out behind it.
Maybe it's only a second-rate Eden but I like it!
