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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A scruffy dingo-dog cross and a couple of cats lounged near the roller-door entrance, lazily observing the proceedings as their owners shook our hands in formal welcome and ushered us into a large living space: concrete floor, Laminex-surfaced table and metal chairs, no fuss.
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.
All but 4% of the 80,000 hectares of rainforest on the Atherton Tablelands were razed for the yeoman’s idyll of smiling homesteads, rosy-cheeked children and plump wives, , which only dissipated with the world heritage listing of the wet tropics in 1988.
Community efforts relied on meagre government environment funding and focused on planting dense stands of native seedlings to form an instant closed canopy.
No matter how carefully the plants were placed (such as along creek lines), this expensive approach could not underpin the landscape-scale change that was desperately needed to restore the country to any semblance of its former glory.
On 28 January 2011, a bunch of academics and a crack team of planters with dirt under their fingernails and dreadlocks like flowing lianas, assembled to build the foundations of a rainforest with 30,000 plants, and to create the conditions for a phoenix to rise once more from the ashes.
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