CLOUD

LAND
The dramatic story of
Australia’s extraordinary
rainforest people
and country

P E N N Y VA N O O S T E R Z E E

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 First published in 2023

Copyright © Penny van Oosterzee 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have
any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the
publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

Cammeraygal Country
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Allen & Unwin acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which we
live and work. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Elders, past and present.

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia

ISBN 978 1 76106 840 9

Author photograph by Martin Willis

Illustrations by William Cooper
Map by Guy Holt
Index by Garry Cousins
Set in 12/16 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by the Opus Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
management of the world’s forests.

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 CONTENTS

PART ONE: LAND OF THE TREE-KANGAROO 1

Chapter One: Ambush 3

Chapter Two: The getting of wisdom 13
Chapter Three: The new world 33
Chapter Four: A million years of rain 45
Chapter Five: Zombie busters 68
Chapter Six: The walk 77
Chapter Seven: Mabi’s world 93
Chapter Eight: Nothing is nothing 120

PART TWO: PEOPLE OF THE RAINFOREST 145

Chapter Nine: Thiaki’s theatre of the absurd 147

Chapter Ten: Evolution, interrupted 171
Chapter Eleven: The other side of the pincer 183
Chapter Twelve: Desultory little massacres 193
Chapter Thirteen: Fugitive pieces 213
Chapter Fourteen: The final stand? 233
Chapter Fifteen: From little things . . . 244

Acknowledgements269
Notes271
Index302

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 PART ONE
Land
The of of
Land thethe
Tree-kangaroo
Tree Kangaroo

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 Thiaki rainforest

Water tickling, trickling down drip tips, stems, hollows

  and cracks,
branch-trunk armpits tufted with epiphytes,
scratches of tree-kangaroos and possums
damp crevassed and pitted trunk,
mottled with clinging passengers,
ropes of lianas, lichens, beards of moss, filmy ferns
weirs in the rivers of vertical water
flowing to the ocean of life that is soil and soul,
roots like reefs.

Ahh, sun
warmth on a cool canopy,
burning cloud-drenched leaves,
piercing holes in the dragging mist,
etching the forest silhouette
in slanting shadowed rays
clinging beads of water dissipate
from multi-dimensional layers
in a breath.

     Penny van Oosterzee

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 CHAPTER ONE

Ambush

M y relationship with Thiaki started with an ambush.

It wasn’t your usual ambush, but it was an ambush, never-
theless. We’d crept along a narrow track that ran atop a volcanic
ridge, the sound of crunching gravel under the car’s wheels muffled
by a narrow strip of trees edging the track. We came to the back
of a brick house, which had a neat lawn adorned with a cement
girl holding a concrete birdbath. Sheds were stacked with rainforest
timber, and cattle yards were perched further ahead at the end of
the ridge.
Ridges with level ground were in short supply on the random
boneless volcanic landscape of the Atherton Tablelands. A scruffy
dingo–dog cross and a couple of cats lounged near the roller-door
entrance, lazily observing the proceedings as their owners, Barry and
Kirsten Pember, shook our hands in formal welcome and ushered us
into a large living space: concrete floor, laminex-surfaced table and
metal chairs, no fuss.

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 CLOUD L A N D

Suddenly, we saw something captivating through the large

east-facing window. Concealed, up until now, was a jungled land-
scape with the highest mountain in Queensland, Mount Bartle
Frere, sheathed in shifting cloud on the horizon. Draped in mist,
the rainforest exhaled a long, slow, yogic-like breath; it created a
ghostly play of shapes and forms, like an exhumation of prehistoric
creatures from a deep memory. They drifted upwards in sinuous
lines, dissipating as they merged into the warming air. The rain­
forest, etched by the rising sun, was a preternatural presence: aloof,
almost sentient in its self-awareness. But with as many individual
organisms as cells in the human brain, it was hardly an ‘it’. Nor
a he or she. I was looking at ‘them’.
I looked sideways at the profiles of my husband and son who
were slack-jawed in wonder. I guess we’d have to buy them, then:
the forest was for sale. I’d discovered them on the internet just a few
weeks before. I was aware of the absurdity of it, like a short-lived
bacterium in my gut deciding it needed to buy me. Nevertheless,
this forest could be ours for the short microbial life left to us.

At the bottom of the steep little valley that cradles a gurgling

spring-fed stream, we have a water pump squatting in a small rocky
hole and covered by the rotund body of an old wringer washing
machine to protect it from silt. Steep enough to make walking diffi-
cult, Pump Valley was one of the few valleys of Thiaki rainforest
spared from logging, so massive trees over 30 metres in height still
dapple leaf-littered slopes in hazy light. My husband, Noel, and
I were making our way down the 40-degree slope to check the
pump, scrambling from one tree trunk to the next to break our fall.
We stopped to catch our breath just above the sheer-sided bank of
the creek, admiring the green light of deep forest before descending.
Suddenly, there was a loud and sickening snap directly above us,
accompanied by a whirr and shower of leaves. We threw our arms

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 AMBU S H

above our heads, expecting to be crushed by a large branch complete

with a tonne of epiphytes, but instead a chunky tree-kangaroo
plummeted to the ground at our feet, so close that it flicked the
rim of Noel’s hat. I watched in astonishment as the animal landed
first on a backbone seemingly reinforced for such an activity, and
then rolled the few metres down to the creek bottom where she
frenetically found her hind feet and took off, apparently unscathed,
up the opposite slope in a frenzy of low-crouching leaps typical
of the species. Recently evolved from their rock-wallaby forebears
to climb trees, Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroos drop to their ancestral
ground when they feel threatened.
Still, this is reckless behaviour for a creature weighing up to
10 kilograms. For an instant, I imagined the disbelieving face of a
police officer as I explained that a plummeting tree-kangaroo had
killed my life-insured husband. I’ve always thought that Thiaki
had a certain attitude that was embodied in stinging trees, lawyer
vines, scrub itch, ticks and missiles of dead or rotting branches, not
to mention the odd antipodean drop bear.
Thiaki is a 180-hectare scrap of cloud forest, the northern section
of a larger 1000-hectare patch, in the Wet Tropics of Australia. The
patch is the largest privately owned remnant of rainforest that once
cloaked the entire Atherton Tablelands of Far North Queensland.
Frequently swathed in mist, Thiaki is a known hotspot for tree-
climbing kangaroos, lemuroid ringtail possums, Herbert River
ringtail possums and the green ringtail possum. All 13 species of
birds that are endemic to northern Queensland rainforests—
including cassowaries and golden bowerbirds—grace the place.
Thiaki forest harvests the first runnels of rainwater that even-
tually collect in two streams; these slip down the irregular valleys
and chisel the sides of the dormant three-million-year-old
Malanda volcano before merging into Thiaki Creek and then the
North ­Johnstone River that collects water from the southern and
south-eastern Atherton Tablelands before rushing out to the
Great Barrier Reef at Innisfail. A wistful Greek must have named

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 CLOUD L A N D

Thiaki Creek, and the adjacent Ithaca Creek, in memory of Homer’s

The Odyssey.1 This ancient Greek epic follows heroic Odysseus,
King of Ithaca, who strives against the whim of meddlesome gods
to return home after the battle of Troy, where his signature Trojan
horse trick wins the war.
But a place less like thirteenth-century BC Ithaca—also called
‘Thiaki’ by the Ionian locals—with its bare goat-grazed slopes and
groves of olives and grapes, you couldn’t imagine. The identity of
the forlorn Greek is lost to history, as short as European history is in
this part of the world where Dreaming and evolution rule.
Being the second work of Western literature, Homer’s epic just
tips into history. But in the world of Homer, fantasy and reality
blend in the bizarre and grotesque. The world is ruled by the super­
natural. There are gods and spirits everywhere, creating havoc,
having sex with humans, wrecking ships at sea, changing people
into pigs, and luring sailors to their death with siren song. You
can visit hell and speak to the mournful dead. There are nymphs of
springs and rivers, caves and lakes; there are monsters and witches;
there are cannibals dashing men’s brains on the ground and tearing
them limb from limb ‘leaving nothing, neither entrails nor flesh,
marrow nor bones’.2
The homesick Greek must have had a fantastic imagination.
Or was he onto something?

Once upon a time, tells the Australian Aboriginal cosmology, the

land was featureless and bare of life. There were no plants to clothe
its nakedness; there was no sound to break its utter silence. For
an eternity, this Dreaming world lay flat and unbroken. Ancestral
life, hidden under the surface, began to lurch and stumble onto
the forbidding landscape to mould, gouge, compress and stretch
it with geological force. Ages passed, and creatures of wonderful
diversity and phenomenal size emerged and moved across the land.

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 AMBU S H

­ verywhere the god-like incarnations roamed, everything they did,

E
and any heroic interaction they had—fighting, fucking, gather-
ing food, resting, eating, participating in ceremonies, giving birth,
shitting, dying—spilled life essence on the land and marked it with
a natural feature. Shimmering between human and non-human
form, these great spirit shapeshifters patterned the land in an elab-
orate weaving of mythical Dreaming tracks.3
Australia’s hundreds of Aboriginal countries are uniquely bound
by a fine mesh of Dreaming tracks: songlines that stitch and weave
the world together into a complex and connected pattern. Anthro-
pologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt4 suggested that a ‘who’s who’
list of mythical characters from just one Country would today fill a
volume; a map of Australia would be scrimshawed with a compli-
cated crisscrossing of mythical tracks and traces, and pierced with
galaxies of sites: rock paintings, rocks, lakes, pools, trees, hills and
mountains, gorges and waterfalls. All sentient, all made by great
ancestors living, dying, fighting and loving, connecting one place to
another, one species to another: ‘singing up everything’;5 perform-
ing rituals, distributing plants, making landforms and water; leaving
totems and totemic centres that weld specific human groups with
non-humans or with phenomena such as wind and rain. Making
Laws for living.
The ancestors have human characteristics: some are kind; some
are very bad indeed and make Homer’s world look like a kinder­
garten; some are sacred Lawgivers with hypernatural powers that
ignore time and space, and resonate to this day in strong emotions;
some are simply ancestors going about their lives. Many trav-
elled from across the sea; some emerged in a particular region and
dissolved back into the ground in the same area. Others journeyed
across vast distances, leaving a trail of sacred sites across the conti-
nent. Some fled to the sky as stars and the moon.
In highly populated countries, where resources were partic-
ularly rich, such as those encompassing the modern-day cities of
Darwin, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, the scrimshaw

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 CLOUD L A N D

of Dreaming tracks might be comparable to a high-density, imbri-

cated rail network, irregularly gridding the Country and connecting
each named stopping point and intersection.6
Deborah Bird Rose7 provided some of the most evocative prose
I know to describe for non-Indigenous people how Aboriginal
people view Country. Country is a living entity with a conscious-
ness, and a will towards life. People talk about Country in the same
way that they would talk about a person: they speak to Country,
sing to Country, visit Country, worry about Country, feel sorry for
Country and long for Country. People weep for Country. There
is no such thing as ‘spending a day in the country’, no such thing
as going out ‘into nature’.
I spent a decade living in Central Australia, trying to come to
terms with the different worldviews. A Traditional Owner cried
with pain and guilt as he explained the theft decades earlier of sacred
objects from a cave. It was he who held the ultimate responsibility
for the objects; he alone who could use them to make the rivers
run with honey, and the Country strong. He blamed himself for
the loss—not the thief, not the missionaries, not the murderous
cattle barons—and for the deteriorating state of his Country.
Country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, and is
sorry or happy. Country is raw and has a lively sense of humour.
I laughed with the women, their gestures raunchy and their ample
swinging breasts painted with sacred patterns. Applied with ceremo-
nial song, the patterns transformed the women so they were at once
themselves, the embodiment of the ancestors and part of Country,
sewn into its very fabric. Accompanied by a chorus of song, they
danced with gusto the stories of a priapic old ancestral man, all
penis and not much brain, chasing young women through the
desert, tripping over himself with ardour—each gesture gouging
features into the land. It was as much as the women could do to
maintain the storyline, rolling about in mirth, wiping eyes wet with
laughter. The story runs deep, though, and the women will not wash
until the ochre is worn off their skin or bound to it. While the

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 AMBU S H

original inhabitants of Country have given it a human presence,

Country, in turn, has given its people a voice and a presence that
doesn’t stop at the skin but continues out into the land.
Country—its land, sky, wind, animals, plants, earth, rivers, sea,
rain, and the way they intertwine—provides the logos of Law. The
Law is first and foremost place-based. The shape and content of
each person’s Country are constant and unambiguously provide a
matrix for ecological and political stability,8 seamlessly binding an
intimate knowledge of nature into all social and economic relations
and ceremony, and placing obligations on all of creation, not just
people. Living things communicate by their sounds, smells, actions
and non-actions.
Country calls to people, beckoning certain folk as food comes
into plenty. Every sound or movement is followed with rapt atten-
tion. In this cosmology, all creatures have a rich social life with
family quarrels, disobedient children, and unfaithful husbands
and wives. But all follow the Law because they are all manifesta-
tions of the same essential being, as are rivers, mountains, planets
and stars.
Totems weld together a person and their specific human and
non-human groups. A person can have more than one totem,
ensuring that ties bind different countries in familial relationships.
Totems do not need to be of direct benefit to humans. Certain
plants of little use to humans provide food for birds, turtles, fish
and flying foxes. Other fruiting plants are good for humans and
for turkeys and dingoes. Pollen provides food for bees so they
can make sugarbag (honey). A certain fig is good for making imple-
ments and is eaten by turtles. That fig also announces the time when
turtles are fat. Ties are recursive, and ecosystems flourish through
looped and entangled relationships. Knowledge is deeply ecologi-
cal and highly localised, yet it is woven across the continent like a
strand in a dillybag. Deborah Bird Rose explains it like this: ‘Events
tell what is going on and call for action. One call leads to another, so
that action is both a response and message . . . Country tells what is

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 CLOUD L A N D

happening; it announces its own patterned eventfulness and invites

engagement.’9
When people in western Cape York went back to Country after
the disease and hideous killing times of early last century, they
found that the land, which had not seen humans for many years,
had ‘gone wild’—the scrub thick, the grass long and unburnt, foot-
paths closed up, and open ridge tops grown over. People approached
the intensely alive Country nervously and with extreme caution, as
forces angered by the lack of care might strike: a snake bite, spider
bite, crocodile attack or tree fall could be revenge for neglect. To
calm the feisty presences and make the area ritually safe, the recog-
nisable underarm smell of a senior Traditional Custodian was given
as he called out to ancestors and spirits.10
Aboriginal landscape awareness is drenched in religious sensibility,
but equally the Dreaming is saturated with environmental conscious-
ness. Theology and ecology are fused11 as people work in tandem with
the ancestors. So closely acquainted with the habits and mannerisms
of wild creatures are they that in the evening, when the anecdotes of
the day are related, the people seem to become each particular animal
through their clever miming and imitation of sounds: ‘the dull-witted
emu, the great stupid bird twisting its neck in quick stilted move-
ments as it tries to assess the significance of some unfamiliar sound
or movement,’ wrote Edward Docker in western New South Wales.

Then a hunter leaps from behind a tree, and the emu seems
to gather up its skirts and run helter-skelter across the plain,
with the delighted audience shouting derisive jokes after
it, and very likely pretending to identify it with some aged
relative whom it is safe to mock. If the performance is at all
clumsy or unconvincing the audience laughs and boos the
actors off the stage.12

In the desert, one observer wrote of one ceremony that, even

though there were no body decorations or painted shields, was

10

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 AMBU S H

an unforgettable example of beauty in movement and artistry

in acting and mime.13
The relationship of people to Country is uniquely expressed in
ceremony, dance and song. Deborah Bird Rose wrote that when
you dance, ‘you are dancing the earth, and the earth is dancing you,
and so perhaps you are motion, a sound, a wave of connection’14
allowing the Dreaming to unfold and become animate.
In the jungles of the Wet Tropics, author Ion Idriess wrote of a
ceremony held on a still night in a grassy pocket hidden within the
depths of the rainforest. Earlier, the men had painted themselves
with pipe clay and used blood to adhere the immaculate white down
feathers of the sulphur-crested cockatoo. Some had down feathers
only on certain parts of the body, on one leg and not the other,
while others had circular bands and still others had stripes. They
were aids to illusion. Waiting, Idriess watched the full moon rise
high enough to pour light into the pocket, silvering the people, the
waiting trees and the ceremonial ground. Women sat with their legs
folded under them, forming a semicircle.

As one, their clasped hands rose and came sharply down

between their thighs, and the human drum in a startling
crash reverberated throughout the clearing again and
again and again. From behind them, within the black
jungle, a sudden roar of voices was sustained in an animal
savagery as out glided ghosts—some, I could swear, were
floating—ghosts that were living skeletons, ghosts all
white and seeming almost shapeless, others with but one
ghostly arm, one ghostly leg, others all white but headless,
others all body but legless. The howl in those voices, which
now all merged into one, fairly made my hair stand on end
as they came gliding past the human drum that now was
fairly crashing with sound as the oncoming phalanx, with
stamping feet, added thunder to the sound. I actually felt
the earth vibrate as with one shuddering roar they came

11

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 CLOUD L A N D

bounding straight toward us, waving spears and clubs and

those mighty swords.15

Correct performance of ceremony as well as attendant and

obligatory land management calls to ecosystems. Poor manage-
ment is met with punishment: blinding if a rainforest patch is
mistakenly burned, or collapsed numbers of yam bulbs if the tops
are not put back in the soil.16
And land, in turn, calls to be managed so it can be shepherded
safely through shifts and changes.

12

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