I recently stayed at a private club in Brisbane where the dress code specifically forbade short-sleeved safari suits. The lobby had a nine-metre ceiling. Its lower half was clad in lustrous rainforest timbers and in it lurked a massive estuarine crocodile wearing a pained expression, some Jazz-Age taxidermist having force-fed it a barrel.

Brisbane’s CBD happened like a speed date between horny, newly moneyed teens. Its river is fringed with a tableau vivant of the hare-brained futurisms (almost all immediately dated and trite) that developers eagerly enable. Its banks are a frozen frenzy of money trying to beget money. Brisbane is civilisation’s idea of a quickie.

Its art gallery, if you can find an entrance, holds almost nothing. Its museum has been overrun by Lego dinosaurs leering down at Japanese tourists as if at postcoital snacks. All that’s missing is a Lego Attenborough fossicking among their Lego stool to see if the bricks they’re shitting contain Japanese/English phrasebooks. The place will never be accused of cultural theft by the Greeks or Indigenous Australians ... or anyone else.

Twelve of us bussed hurriedly out of that town to the Scenic Rim in the Great Dividing Range and walked up into the rainforest, a place of such specifically adapted plants that it is a fortress against invasion and remains pristine. Soft green light leaches through the canopy and you walk through a world that is almost subterranean, an endless cave system enlivened with birdsong and huffing with rich, mouldy breezes that play plants as if they were oboes and clarinets.

Some days, for a while, we walked alone. Walking alone through a forest is the only way to hear its heart beat and be aware of its blood flowing. If you’re walking in a group, talking to those ahead and behind, your perception is merely casual, you aren’t opening yourself to the place. I was reminded of Bruce Chatwin writing in his fabulously strange book In Patagonia: “I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.”

I like walking with people. But I love walking alone in the bush – it’s the only time it will come alive for you. Certain thoughts can only be thought, certain ghosts can only be seen, while alone. The rainforest is full of phantoms, of stories, connections, sounds, smells, and sights – but to be cognisant of them you must give yourself over to the here and now of this great living thing.

Loading

Roots reach down from the sky in search of the ground, vines reach up for the sky in search of the sun. All around are the carabeen tree and the strangler fig in their centuries-long pas de deux, initially symbiotic, but eventually deadly for the host. There are more than 200 rare or threatened plant species here, in this World-Heritage-listed area. Walk slowly, alone, and they exist. Walk along talking to others and most are already extinct.

We were lucky with our guides through these mountains. Harley and Kate are partners who together abandoned more orthodox corporate lives for this one. They’ve committed to fearlessly and fully knowing the natural world. They’ve read the natural sciences, they know the Latin and indigenous names, they’ve tasted the forest’s full smorgasbord and understand the place like few people have since the original inhabitants were hunted out.