This article by Jo Martin published 19 January 2016 was written in response to the sale of  Barnwell 12 Rural Titles in Kuranda – now the site of the proposed KUR-World / KUR-Cow site.

The Barnwell 12 title 626ha (1547acres, 6.26km2) has highlighted an important issue for our community.  This property, recently sold privately, is one of a few very large historical landholdings still remaining in Kuranda.

The Barnwell property, on Barnwell Road, purchased originally by the Barnwell Family in the 1930’s (?) is a huge tract of land that spans the highway from roundabout The Billabong, right up to behind the Pet Resort.  It is approximately a third of ALL the land in Kuranda that has been subdivided to date.  The swathe of land is habitat country for many of our endangered species – both flora and fauna – and has two sensitive waterways.  $2 million was the selling price.

Back in the day, Kuranda was an outpost of Cairns, being largely inaccessible, except by train line and helicopters that hadn’t been invented yet!  The old ‘main or high street’ was what we call the ‘Myola Straight’ where the post office and the trainmaster were stationed, along with other services.  Rainforest was cleared with abandon to provide a timber industry, cattle, coffee, pineapples and a variety of other food products for ‘export’ to Cairns, Mareeba and further in our region.  Kuranda, with its plentiful water was seen as a ‘foodbowl’ for the growing city of Cairns due to its proximity and suitability for agriculture and grazing.

As the world changed and time progressed, Kuranda came-of-age as a regional Tourist Day-tripper location – part of the reef-rainforest connection here in our Wet Tropics World Heritage area.  Domestic and International tourists have been coming to Kuranda for decades to experience our rainforests, our amazing river and our hugely bio diverse native wildlife.  We pitch ourselves under the eco-tourism tent and talk about conservation and protection for what is left.

The first divisions of the Kuranda rainforest ‘resource’ were very large tracts of land – given to farmers for clearing and cultivation.  I can always imagine that boom time – lots of industry going on – trees falling and being carted off to make our heritage homes – the iconic Queenslander – all those beautiful rainforest timbers – who could resist?  Cattle pasture on rainforest land was bound to be hugely productive as well as the tropical food plants that grow well here.

The Mona Mona mission was in full swing as our local Bama were herded into missions all over our region as the rainforest – their habitat – fell through the force of ‘progress’.  We can call it ‘colonialism’, if you prefer.  These parcels of land that were already inhabited by our Bama – an ancient yet to be appreciated ‘hunter-gatherer’ culture – and SOLD to colonialists – to take as their own.  Seems a bit strange now… but hey… this is history right?

As time went on, actual land use changed: farms came and went, forest grew back, re-growth was cut down again, smaller and smaller residential sub-divisions and clearings started to happen after the Range Road was completed in the 1940’s.  As accessibility increased to our village, colonial settlement and ‘progress’ expanded into the Kuranda Region.

In the early days of non-farming settlers in Kuranda, there seemed to be a higher than average proportion of ‘hippies’ or ‘greenies’… similar to areas in northern NSW like Byron Bay and Nimbim, also flourishing with alternative culture of the day.  Pre- airconditioner and flyscreen days saw only those people who could hack living here in Kuranda, stay.

In 1988, our region was given the classification of ‘World Heritage’ which attaches pages and pages of points as to why our Wet Tropics area is so special.  There are very few places on earth like this place – really.  No, really.  And fewer places left today.  This is one of my favourites:

UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE CONVENTION

Criterion (viii): The Wet Tropics contains one of the most complete and diverse living records of the major stages in the evolution of land plants, from the very first pteridophytes more than 200 million years ago to the evolution of seed-producing plants including the cone-bearing cycads and southern conifers (gymnosperms), followed by the flowering plants (angiosperms). As the Wet Tropics is the largest part of the entire Australasian region where rainforests have persisted continuously since Gondwanan times, its living flora, with the highest concentration of primitive, archaic and relict taxa known, is the closest modern-day counterpart for Gondwanan forests. In addition, all of Australia’s unique marsupials and most of its other animals originated in rainforest ecosystems, and the Wet Tropics still contains many of their closest surviving members. This makes it one of the most important living records of the history of marsupials as well as of songbirds. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/486

It all sounds a bit ‘sciency’ of course – so to break it down – Gondwana was the time in earth’s history – 200 million years ago – where the continents looked like this:

The climate was warm and wet, the rainforests plentiful.  Biodiversity and abundance.  As the continents separated and moved to their current locations the climate has changed many times.  Ice ages have come and gone.  Gondwana  began to break up in the early Jurassic (about 184 million years ago) accompanied by massive eruptions of basalt lava, as East Gondwana, comprising Antarctica, Madagascar, India, and Australia, began to separate from Africa.  These land masses carried species that were separated at that time like a Time Capsule – plants and animals began to adapt to their newly separated environments – and over the following years many species became extinct while others have persevered to this day.

It’s hard to weigh up ‘progress’ against our natural heritage.  At what cost?  How far do we go into extinctions before we figure maybe there’s something worth saving here?  Are we interested in any way to preserve these only-found-in-this-place species?  Zoo populations don’t count by the way ;- )

As human civilisations have evolved on earth, over time and under radically different climatic conditions, our cultures have favoured certain attributes.  In the early days of human development, Manual Arts were sought after… the ability to make things from our imagination and experiment with different material technologies to improve techniques.  Gardeners – or food growers – were sought after to identify the plants that were safe for humans to eat and the various growing information for each plant was held in the Onboard Memory System called The Brain.  This information was handed down, generation to generation, as an oral tradition on ‘how to survive in this place’.  Medicinal plant knowledge was also vitally important, of course.  People who could remember stories, that could pass on those stories to the next generation, were held in great esteem because learning from past experiences was a very important and crucial mechanism for survival in the here and now.  There were Apprentices under each ‘survival specialty’ – learning the skills of their Elders – to share in their own generation – and of course to preserve and pass to the next.  Dating back to the earliest civilisations Artists – or documenters – used culturally commonplace materials to preserve their stories wherever the opportunity presented itself – pre Internet, Books, Printing Press, Fine Art paintings, papyrus, etc – this information was held in stone, clay, bark, cave walls, artefacts – the ‘modern’ technology of the day!  Today – our Artists continue to preserve the historical human story.

Plenty of hard times befell early humans – earth changing climatic events and impacts, and more localised crises like rivers or wells drying up, seasonal changes, pests on food crops, etc.  There aren’t many stories remaining from those times – only Ancient Mysteries – as they’re so-called these days – which doesn’t extend far enough to capture the lives and stories of earlier times, before so-called anatomically ‘Modern’ humans.  There are strong older cultures on earth today that can be found where the push of ‘progress’ is still yet to reach.

How do we define ‘progress’ exactly?  It seems these days the Money Machine is the only valid measurement for progress – and it’s only if you hold that notion in high esteem that you’re in the club – the actual living part is some kind of afterthought, weirdly enough.  If we define CSG mining in our State Forests and farmlands as ‘progress’ – bearing in mind the poisoning of the land, water and air – is this really progress?  Progress for whom?

Progress noun development towards an improved or more advanced condition.

And pushing down Recovering Rainforest to build more human habitat – isn’t there already enough cleared land that is more suitable for this type of development?  Do some people really need more than one house to live in?

The main concern is our Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii, bundarra) – a remnant of the Pliocene period.  We can say this species is our ‘canary’ – in the Colonialism Experiment we are running in real time.  Currently rated Endangered, this creature is not faring so well with progress.  With habitat loss, ahem progress, cited as the main concern endangering this species I guess we’ve all figured we can do without them?  Or it’s someone else’s problem in some other bit of rainforest habitat?

One hundred years ago when there were only few dirt roads in Kuranda the cassowary range was from Townsville up north to the tip of Cape York.  There is a population in New Guinea I’m informed is unprotected, from when New Guinea and Australia were land-bridged together before the last Ice Age melt and the sea level rose 12,000 or so years ago.  The population was split.  In the last hundred years the population at Mission Beach and Townsville have been cut off by clearings, roads and human habitats.  This cassowary population will now be in decline as the breeding stock reduces and the novelty of ‘outsider’ genes can’t be accessed.  As we continue to split the populations further we continue to enhance their genetic decline.  That’s just the way it works.

Now to Kuranda.  Our location in the greater Wet Tropics scheme of things is in the very narrow neck, see picture BELOW LEFT.  The rainforest to the inland side of Kuranda has undergone extensive clearing over a long period of time due to human settlement – and hasn’t been included in the official Wet Tropics map for this reason – not because it’s not worth protecting and replanting to improve the wildlife corridor – see BELOW RIGHT.  When progress cuts down any rainforest, in or near this narrow corridor, the outcome is known.  Habitat loss = inevitable extinction.  It’s just a matter of how long – 30 years?  100 years before we get the news story about the last cassowary standing amid progress?

The main problem with the idea of ‘progress’ is that it implies ‘pushing on at all costs’.  The only favourable outcome can be money – if there are obstacles – remove them if it means less money. I understand that ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’ and that’s how the world is right now.  What I also understand is that change is inevitable and that humans adapt.  SO WHAT if we leave some land to the wild?  Who is really suffering?  Land Developers?  Anyone else?  Show of hands please?

In my philosophical moments I’m always left with the same question – when do we stop?  When does humanity learn that we are, in fact, part of our natural environment and actually need it for our survival?  It seems somewhere along the way we forgot about the ‘circle of life’ idea and don’t attribute any value unless it equates to $$ in our so-called Modern World.  Maybe they stopped teaching that ‘circle of life’ anti-progress crap in our schools?

Today in Kuranda we have many of our original ‘hippies’ and ‘greenies’ still represented… a lot of them inspired by our Bama to protect what is left.  We have a diverse newer generation with many different interests these days… nonetheless there is definitely a common theme here… that we are custodians of this natural wonder – a World Heritage place.  That what is here is worth saving – even though we don’t know how the heck to do that properly yet.  The sell-off by our governments of our natural heritage (did you know our State Forests are CSG and woodchip mines these days – it seems a misnomer?), our commonwealth, continues unabated as the places where our breathable air is recycled and our natural history is documented in living colour, fall.  Once it’s gone, its gone folks.  There’s no bringing it back.  So where does it stop?  How do we decide that for our Kuranda Region?   How do we agree to represent our native forests in the bureaucratic mess we’ve ended up with?  When does humanity come to really, really, really understand what is contained in this missive below – I guess it’s called a ‘meme’ these days:

In my day, and our children’s, we read ‘The Lorax’ by Dr Seuss – an awesome human story in this book that has been preserved over millenia – the movie didn’t get the message quite right.  No surprises there :- )

So we don’t have any excuses now, do we?  We are a storytelling animal: we share and preserve our ideas via this creative media – we always have – be it rock paintings or fine Renaissance art.  We’ve always told and retold the stories of our times.  The Lorax was written 45 years ago – as a warning to the future.  That we would get to this moment.  And now we are here.

Assumptions:

1. Precedent, ie. just because it’s been done before, does not equate with it being sensible at a later time.
2. Progress – at all costs – is not a valid excuse to cut down native forests.
3. There is such a thing as sensible and sensitive development using the information we already have at hand, from our scientists at the Wet Tropics Mangement Authority.

Questions:

1. What should the scaling be for block clearing sizes overall in Kuranda?  How can we minimise the clearings and maximise the corridors in already developed residential areas?  What kinds of safeguards can we build into our Planning Scheme to help preserve and renew habitat in the future?
2. When historical landholdings come up for private sale what new process can we use to assess the land for natural heritage value in respect to corridors?  $2 million would be small money well spent by our Federal government to preserve this land as natural heritage.  To zone it a Forest Reserve.  If we don’t start protecting this stuff soon the wildlife will all be living in the corridors and not in-the-wild because there won’t be any left!
3. Do we know where the ancient cassowary migratory/connective path is?  Can we consciously provide thoroughfare for them under by-passes in certain locations, the high risk areas where there have been numerous road deaths of cassowaries?  Can we actively preserve certain corridors over others because there are known paths?  This is even possible in rural residential areas where clearing, fencing and pets can be zoned to a minimum in those high cassowary traffic areas.  What resources do we have to find this stuff out?