Fred Baker

Have just returned from a heady week of ideas and words at the Watermark Literary Muster in the village of Kendall, NSW. Being broke as usual, I was most grateful for an offer of free accommodation from Peta Simmons, a woman whose generosity is as large as her laugh. She’d never met me, just wanted to help writers.

Her guest ‘humpy’ turned out to be to be a cute cottage behind her house, all on one large deck. Hidden behind trees, it was right beside the railway line, the railway crossing and the railway bridge over the lazy brown river.

This gave me a novel experience – being awoken by the dinging of the level crossing bells before being shaken by the rising roar of the train as it belted past and over the metal bridge. The house is built of steel, on big recycled steel posts, deeply embedded in the ground on rubber-topped pads. The train tremor reverberates through the whole house and the bodies of its inhabitants. Yet this was a thrill rather a worry: the place felt extremely secure and I went back to sleep each time.

Its other plus is that it is right on the river, which, in between long slow drifts of leaves, blinked with the coloured reflections of a passenger express or a goods train as it flew over the criss-crossed steel suspension bridge.

On the last day of the Muster, we were taken by the Kendall Historical Society up into the mountains behind the village, for a walk along the old Longworth Logging Tramway.

Here logging trains were inched over wooden rails, past giant trees, and across log bridges in gullies, to take the timber down to the very river next to which I’d been sleeping. This was how delicate selective logging used to be before giant companies and giant machines invented clearfelling.

Our guide had owned a timber company: we agreed that unsustainable logging practices were unnecessary and had caused many of the industry problems and the closures.

We both shook sorrowful heads at the waste of good timber in the whole wood pulp disaster. Good greenies and good loggers are in agreement here.

I’d imagined Port Douglas would be like Byron Bay, only hotter. In fact it is more like Double Bay gone troppo.

Built for well-heeled tourists, the town is composed of man-made tropical gardens, tourist accommodation, shopping and eating places — and day spas. There is one petrol station, hidden in a back street. The petrol is cheap; the accommodation is not. The range of designer and exotic clothes was vast, and surprisingly inexpensive for their quality.

At half the price of the Peppers Day Spa, we had a fantastic long massage each at the friendly Port Douglas Day Spa in the main street, near Paddy’s Irish Pub. I highly recommend this Spa: instant results.

When I returned to the waiting room, all pink and relaxed and oily, a man seated there said, ‘I hope I come out looking as beautiful as this young woman’. He wouldn’t believe I was nearly 60, and I wouldn’t believe the owners hadn’t paid him to sit there and say such things.

Painted my toenails hot pink for the first time in 30 years after that!

The many restaurants seemed dear to me, and were astonishingly lacking in even token vegetarian options. Seafood is big, of course, and Emily made the most of that.  Daytime — the coffee, the whimsy and the background music at the buzzy Re-hab in the main street is great.

On the third night we discovered ‘Gone Bananas’, and fell in love with its unique indoor rainforest atmosphere, its cheery and efficient staff — and its fabulous food. Great value for its very reasonable prices — we’d have thought so at higher ones.

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Up there beyond Cairns they have spectacular mountains looming close to the coast. Like my own mountains, they too are often shrouded in mist – and mystery.

There is a sharp contrast between the well-used flatlands of sugarcane, cow pastures, and, increasingly, housing estates.

Head up into those hills, dodging the little sugarcane trains whose tracks meander over the paddocks and across the roads, and there is sudden primeval rainforest, too steep to have been cleared.

We peeked in at the edges of the World Heritage Mossman Gorge, the Daintree Rainforest, and the Daintree River, where signs warned us of crocodiles and tourist buses and adventure tour 4WDS flowed as abundantly as the water.

My friend Emily last came here 40 years ago, when Cairns was but a tiny village and there were nought but a few dirt tracks to threaten the Daintree. I guess this is Progress.