She smiled at me, as I was passing. I smiled back, quickly and faintly. I didn’t want the inadequates on the bikes to think I was smiling at them.

We stood outside our caravan and watched the sky go pink over the Dagmar Ranges. Palm leaves swayed and creaked against parked vehicles. The undergrowth began to stir. We waited until the last reflection of light had gone from the evil river, then we went inside.

Just before bedtime, from a house that couldn’t have been very far away, we heard the sounds of an electric organ. It gave us ‘Beautiful Day’ three times, a few tunes I didn’t recognize, and finished up with ‘You Are My Sunshine’. After that the sounds of the tropical rainforests took over. Piercing screams of living things in anguish in the trees. I’d heard that crocodiles made barking noises, and I lay awake a long time listening, wondering if there was any reason to suppose that one wouldn’t come out of the water and head in the direction of our on-site van. There was only a flimsy catch on our door. Not one that would keep out the Irish motorcyclist either. I went to sleep at last entrusting my fate to chance, unable to tolerate any longer the sounds of Nature’s nightly tearing of itself apart.

In the morning we took a safari cruise down the Daintree River. Us and about twenty other people: a motley collection including three smart-talking kids from Sydney Uni; a middle-aged couple from Melbourne (he silent, she vibrant) and their fat, comatose daughter; a handsome and sophisticated American/Japanese pair, neither carrying a camera; and a discordantly blue-collar family from Port Kembla, comprising a fleshly pouting wife, a fleshly pouting baby, and a tattooed husband in a blue singlet who turned out to know more about birds, plants and crocodiles than any of us except David, our guide and captain.

Carefully controlled and bearded, a judicious weigher of every statement and emotion, a man who at all times gave the impression of someone who had come up here to get away from people but still hadn’t got far away enough, David had clearly not been on the side of those who pulled Greenies out of trees and pumped bullets into crocodiles. That the two issues were intimately related he didn’t at all doubt; according to him, those who had lined up on one side for the first lined up identically for the second. To chop or not to chop, to shoot or not to shoot – they came down to more or less the same thing. He was full of passions about all that had catapulted sleepy little Daintree into public prominence, but he was weary of it too. Every day he had to answer questions such as ours, and every day he had to look away when he passed the other faction in the street – except that Daintree didn’t have a street.