LAWRIE WILLIAMS: Atherton Tablelands - Noah's Ark

Please let me tell you a story about Noah's Ark. I am but a steerage passenger, but I pick up the scuttlebutt and this tale will be of interest to all who care about vanishing animals.

This old world is not always so calm and serene. From time to time dreadful events take place and the planet is cooked and then profoundly chilled. The most likely cause of these mass extinction events is the result of the Earth and another object trying to pass through the same point in space at the same time, but in different directions. The best known is the big impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs. Debris from the impact went sub-orbital and rained down all around the planet. For one dreadful hour the sky turned white hot and the world beneath became like an oven. In the aftermath dust in the air shrouded the surface and for years Jack Frost reigned supreme. It could not rain, plants could not grow, and the survivors of the impact should all have perished.

This has happened over over, for the world is very old and space is anything but empty.

There are some places where life can survive, like in the ocean deeps. On the warm shores and in lush valleys there are places in the mud and deep hollows where animals aestivate, awaiting better times. Snails, frogs and crocodiles can do this. Perhaps one of our distant ancestors was a creature like the Malagasy fat-tailed dwarf lemur, quietly aestivating when the world ended long ago.

But that is only part of the story. Another vital part was told to me by a friend who has a name like mine, only the other way around, a great biologist by the name of William Laurance. He visited the Atherton Tablelands back in 1986 and told the most marvelous story. He said that when the DNA of plants is studied it is found to have spread from certain points on the globe called key genetic reservoirs. So whenever the world ends it is from these places that life starts all over again. One such place is the Atherton Tablelands. Underneath us is an aquifer. Rainwater thousands of years old works its way through the rocks to emerge at this end in springs that form creeks of pure water. It is in the deep gorges in the waterfall mist that life can cling to existence. Small wonder the Aborigines called this little district "water-water", or Millaa Millaa, always cloaked in rainforest until the coming of the axe, the chainsaw and the bulldozer. Much of it is now bare and vulnerable.

So it was that when disaster struck and the sky became incandescent the rainforest canopy provided shade for the plants and creatures below. The canopy in extremis may have been burnt to a crisp but it did its task. In the aftermath there was a pair of every creature, riding on this wonderful natural Noah's Ark, able to go forth and multiply when regular seasons returned to the world.

The rainforest and its myriad inhabitants survived here to spread all over the world afterwards. This is the home of the flowers of the world. Please think on that next time you see a blossom.

I wonder if life will survive the next natural holocaust. People just love the abundant clean water that comes from the aquifer. In places near Atherton they have but to drill a hole and the water comes bubbling out of the ground. From Mareeba to Millaa Millaa this irreplaceable aquifer is bleeding as never before from tens of thousands of pin-pricks.

Down here at the southern end the springs are failing. The big rainforest trees are starting to die. Meanwhile farmers upstream continue to pump out the aquifer, blasting ancient water into the dry air so that much of it never reaches the ground. The waterfalls are not what they were. Ignorant yoiks around here are killing the future of the world. Parliament is in Brisbane a thousand miles away and the politicians there could not find their bums with both hands. The ark that sustained life on this world for so long is being sabotaged while the words of warning from those who understand are lost in the wind....

IMAGE KeyGeneticReservoir.jpg Courtesy Google Earth. Queensland coast with Cairns and Port Douglas at top right. Origin of the aquifer is at top of picture. Rainforest fragments may be seen in the foreground. Many species are doomed because the habitat is too small to support them.