I still wasn’t ready to rush straight back to the Expo. There were a few sights that were supposed to be worth looking at in the area, including the famous Curtain Fig Tree just outside Yungaburra, no more than twenty minutes away. We could spend a couple of hours as leisurely tourists and still be back at the Showgrounds in time for the Tableland Twinklers Round Dance Group and the Cairns and District Chinese Association’s Lion Dance. We could even miss those at a pinch as long as we made it for Love Test – a jazz dance by Ibina Cundell that had been arousing a lot of early interest.

The Curtain Fig Tree (ficus virens) proved to be a spectacularly beautiful example of the sort of parasitism – death by long embrace – we’d witnessed on the Daintree River. It had climbed the trunk and branches of the host tree and then sent its own roots downwards in a slow but certain strangulation. In this way had the means of murder become the veil to shield the murder, the downward trailing roots hanging like a bamboo curtain behind which you could barely see the bent and shadowy form of the original tree.

Yungaburra itself, although less famous than its landmark, was a pretty, melancholy, arty little village built around something very like a village green. It had a lovely timber hotel – the Lake Eacham – better cared for inside than out, an Alternative General Store, a coffee shop that sold pottery and woodcraft, and a gallery that was as garrulous as any I’d ever come across. On an old renovated mangle in the garden a sign said, ‘Welcome to the finest art gallery in North Queensland . . . The Artists’ Gallery was designed to show art for art’s sake, not a quick quid . . .’ Inside were further notices telling you what you were expected not to do: eat, drink, smoke (we respect your blah blah . . . but applaud your blah blah), make inappropriate assumptions about art, think you knew what you were looking at when you didn’t, and so on. But you had to get to the antique escritoire and read what was on that before you could count yourself a fit judge of what was hanging on the walls.

Art is an experience. We feel the movement of ballet, the intensity of painting, the emotion of music. This is the joy of art.

What many of us never feel is the pain. The agony of perfection. The discipline of trying again and again. The pain of working past one’s own limits to reach that level of acclaim. The pain of disapproval, the pain of failure.

The pain of struggling so hard for so long only to find you have to start all over again. This is the pain of art that only the artists themselves can endure. Because their motivations come from within.

The next time you experience Art, applaud the joy – and the pain.