Cape Tribulation Moai / Rob's Place

Rainforest Hideaway is a wonderfully creative environment. Although I am not making books at the moment, I am making lots of other things, as well as writing plenty of poetry and prose. Rob is also eternally creative with several projects on the go at any one time. His latest passion is for building giant concrete scultptures like Rapa Nui moai (Easter Island heads). Here's some photos of the first one coming into existence, accompanied by a poem I wrote called Rob's Place.

First Rob made the framework of reo bar

Rob uses everything he finds here.

Looking at a gnarly rootball

he sees Medusa’s throne, and makes it.

Deano from next-door welded the reo bar

We live with massive slabs of fallen trees

dragged in from the forest,

smoothed and sealed into muscular furniture.

Rob sculpted the head with three layers of chicken wire

The living room is decorated with driftwood au natural:

a lifesize giraffe, a baby rhinoceros head, a giant melomy fleeing.

Only the frog in the lightshade is real.

I helped by climbing inside to fasten the chicken wire to the reo bar.

Spiders and bats, branches and vines

all come inside, recognizing a sympathetic habitat.

We breakfast with the brush turkey.

Applying the first of two layers of concrete

Outside, narrow tracks lace through the forest,

past structures that seem to float among the trees

but human presence here is not tentative.

Ready for the final layer of concrete with iron oxide to make it dark, then alayer of potting mix porridge, and whole thing wrapped in cling wrap to cure as slowly as possible in the warm weather

Ask Rob’s towering, earthy avatar,

the stern moai rising from the ground

to preside over sunny expanses of water.

Unveiling a week later

Hiding away in the rainforest,

offering a seductive, sensitive vision of belonging

Rob’s place imagines forest life into reality.

Grand Opening of the Bibliophilia Shop

Its not all just walking on the beach and writing poetry in the trees here at Cape Tribulation. Since the rainforest has proved to be an unsuitable environment for making books I have diverted some of my creative energy into establishing (a long overdue) online shop to sell my favourite books I've made in the past four years.

My shop, which is also called Bibliophilia, is proudly located in the Etsy marketplace, a fabulous internet emporium of handcrafted goods from people all over the world. Having Etsy bookmarked on your computer is like have 24 hour access to the biggest, grooviest, art and craft market you can imagine.

I warmly invite you to click through and visit the Bibliophilia shop. More items will be added over time, and if you see anything featured on this blog that you think should be listed in the shop, please let me know by email.

Big Storm

To celebrate the opening of the Bibliphilia shop I have freshened up the look of this blog- since I learned how to create a banner for my shop, I thought I'd make use of it here as well. The colours and images I've used echo some of my most favourite letterpress projects, which featured in the Domestic Pilgrimage exhibition last November, and are now available for the first time with a simple click of the mouse.

Do the Dishes

Sometimes

Off Track

Bumpy satinash with rainforest characteristic 'cauliflory' where flowers and fruit grow directly on the tree trunks.

Off Track

Escaping too many people
I walk off the track
into the trees and eventually
find silence and solitude
where for a few minutes the forest
has me, all of me, here
in love with the chaotic tangle of
death and life
my eyes sliding along graceful buttress roots,
heart skipping in viney spirals,
breath as expansive as fan palms
until sidling between drooping fronds
I collect a veil of spider silk
and some sticky memory tugs on my sleeve
saying wait a while
and confusion takes all my attention
while I patiently unpick every tiny barb
absorbed in the minutia of small difficulties
that have no part of this place
and yet, while I am still
in the focus of freeing myself
the silence of the forest
becomes gradually overtaken
hum by peep, chortle by screech,
a Babel of birds and insects
chorusing Here and Now,
Here and Now,
and I am.

Platter sized fungi growing in front of a buttressed tree,

Bird Gossip

I'm starting to know and appreciate the brush turkeys that hang around Rainforest Hideaway. At first I didn't like them because I thought they were ugly. Indeed, there is little to admire (from a human perspective) about their clashing primary colours, especially the coarse, sparse, black hairs decorating their red head. But I engage with them every day on the back veranda where they come for breakfast with the guests, and I have come to like their cheeky personalities and bright sparkling eyes.
Learning to tell the difference between males and females was a step towards recognising individuals. I'm pretty sure there are three regular visitors: two males and a female. The dominant male will chase anyone off including females and scrub fowl (though he makes himself scarce when the much bigger cassowary come to call). When the dominant male senses the other male he makes a deep booming noise and puffs out his yellow neck into a big dangly bag.
The less dominant male has taken to coming onto the front veranda to get to the house without having to deal with the boss at the back. Unfortunately that's also where we keep our seedlings (papaya, passionfruit, coriander and lemongrass) and turkeys have already scratched a number of seedling trays to oblivion. So when I hear his claws tapping up the steps I chase him off.
One morning I tried imitating the dominant male's 'boom boom' as I chased him, thinking that might be a sound he would respond to, rather than my high-pitch telling off in English. He ran away from me but came back immediately and repeatedly so I think my booming wasn't very convincing. Several of the guests heard me though and got all excited thinking it was a cassowary booming.

Paris and Nicky the cassowary chicks (long legs, small brains, love being photographed, no sign of parents from a young age)

The cassowaries are no longer such frequent visitors as when I first came to live at the Hideaway. Instead of almost daily, we might see one every week or two (but that hasn't stopped me naming them all). First Mama Cass stopped calling, but Papa Cass and little Paris and Nicky would still come by. Then one day I saw the chicks here on their own. I was dreadfully worried that something had happened to their dad and they would be vulnerable without his protection. But the two chicks came by several times without an adult, so they were obviously surviving ok. Then late one afternoon just one of the chicks showed up alone, acting very disorientated. It was back again the next morning wandering around the house for ages. I really started to worry that both the father and the other chick had been gotten by dogs or hit by a car or something.

Paris in foreground (Nicky's large feet behind her head)

Fortunately that weekend I had an opportunity to ask Lawrence Mason, who has been guiding here all his life, about them. He told me the chicks had been seen together that very afternoon on his adjoining property and that they were of an age when the father would no longer be willing to have them around (cassowaries are very solitary and territorial). A week or so later I saw Mama Cass at the house for the first time in ages, and then I heard that the chicks were establishing themselves a couple of kilometers away at the Cape Trib Farmstay.

Splash, Snake and Sting

Cooper's Creek was still flooding across the road (though not as deeply) when Rachel and I set off on our weekend to the Atherton Tablelands. After watching several other little cars of the same breed as ours bravely ford the waters, we summoned the courage to drive across ourselves. Well, actually I waded across on foot first so that I could take this photo of Rachel driving the causeway. As you can see the water was actually not very deep at all compared to two days earlier and five days later (but those are other stories...).

After a stop in Kuranda to visit the Butterfly Sanctuary, we carried on to Mareeba where we enjoyed what would prove to be the only sunshine of Rachel's entire six days in Far North Queensland, reinforcing Mareeba's town slogan of '300 days of sunshine per year'. However, we spent most of our allotment of sunshine inside Coffee World indulging in coffee, liqueurs and chocolates and admiring the hilarious museum of every coffee machine and pot ever made.

We spent much of the weekend driving around the Tablelands under grey skies and walking on muddy tracks through quite a different kind of rainforest than I'm used to at Cape Tribulation. Rachel saw a Lumholtz tree kangaroo. I saw three platypuses (I want to write platypii but the spell check says no!). We visited many many waterfalls, which are one of the main natural attractions on the Tablelands. But my favourite bit of landscape was the Mt Hypipimee Crater lake which is unbelievably deep and mysterious.


We also saw this red belly black snake. I've been going round for ages saying I wanted to see a snake, trying to spot them when I am in the rainforest, and hoping that I don't encounter one by stepping on it in the dark. I thought a big amethyst python would be a benign snake to see for my first FNQ snake encounter. But this sinister black snake was just sitting on a pile of dead wood right next to a fairly busy walking track. Though its eyes looked open it didn't move the whole time I stood at what I hoped was a safe distance and utilised my 12x optical zoom to take photos. It did change positions however, before Rachel saw it 20 or 30 minutes later. My new wildlife book says red belly blacks are 'potentially dangerous' but this sleepy specimen was all potential and no action thank goodness.


My actual encounter with venom was from flora not fauna. See these luscious berries? Don't they make your mouth water at the thought of their raspberry-inspired succulence?


See how when photographing the berries I didn't focus at all on the leaves? If I had paid attention to the shape of the leaves before I reached out my fingers to pluck a single juicy berry from the laden tree, I might, just might, have noticed and remembered that the notorious Stinging Tree*, along with its large heart shaped leaves, has pink raspberry-like berries. If you look closely at the stalk from which the berries are suspended you might notice (as I didn't) the many fine hairs covering it.

The hairs covering every part of the stinging tree are made out of silicon, and are in fact microscopic slivers of glass filled with neurotoxins which cause agonising pain which can last for up to six months. As soon as I had that pink berry between my fingers and felt the silica hairs dive into the pad of my thumb and the crease of my index finger I realised I had met the stinging tree, Dendrocnide moroides.

The pain of the stinging tree is just as excruciating as its reputation threatens. I could tell I was lucky to only have been pierced by the hairs on a very small area of my body, but the pain spread through much of my hand which swelled up and throbbed with varying degrees of intensity from preoccupyingly painful nettle rash (when still and dry) to being stabbed with white hot needles through the bone (when wet, pressured or moved).

All my remembered knowledge of the stinging tree (which I have been alert to, to the point of paranoia, since I first heard of it in FNQ until the very moment that I became mesmerised by the pink berries) churned through my mind, particularly the longevity of the pain and the utter lack of any traditional or modern antidote for the poison. I tried to imagine hurting this much for six months and felt feeble and defeated at having to soldier on through my life so bravely.

After a few hours of misery (more dismal waterfalls, a pretty good farmers/flea/craft market which I just couldn't really enjoy) we went back to our accommodation where the helpful staff suggested trying to extract the stingers with hair removal wax strips. Luckily one was found and applied and followed by applications of duct tape for good measure. All the attention and pressure on my poor hand reduced me to tears at that point but within an hour or two the pain had started to recede.

By the next morning I was ready for another bout of sightseeing. One track we visited had a sign near the start warning about the stinging trees. I wish that every track was so well informed.


I suspect I still have a slivers of toxic silicon broken off deep inside where fortunately they seem mostly impervious to water, which is the worst thing for most people who've been stung. Pressure or cold (I'm trying to remember to squeeze the toothpaste tube with my other hand) can still surprise me with a stab of deep awful pain, but mostly it doesn't hurt at all. In retrospect, it seems like I went into mild shock when I was stung and it took much longer for my mind to clear than for the pain to ease.

*This is such a good link to Stinging Tree info you really should check it out!