Daintree National Park
Interesting facts
- The seed of the idiot fruit holds the largest embryo of any flowering plant, about 5 centimetres high and 6 across.
- The idiot fruit is the only known flowering plant with more than two seed leaves; all others have one or two.
- Botanists found the long-lost idiot fruit again after cattle died at Cow Bay and its huge seeds turned up in their stomachs.
- The idiot fruit seed is so toxic that even cassowaries, which swallow most rainforest fruit whole, leave it alone.
- James Cook named Cape Tribulation on 10 June 1770, shortly before the Endeavour ran aground on a reef just offshore.
- The Daintree River, which gives the park its name, was named by the explorer George Dalrymple after his friend, the geologist Richard Daintree.
- In 1983 protesters occupied trees to stop the Bloomfield Track being bulldozed through the forest north of Cape Tribulation; the road was pushed through in three weeks.
- Cape Tribulation receives about 3,900 millimetres of rain a year, where rainforest grows right down to the beach.
- The park covers about 1,200 square kilometres and absorbed the separate Cape Tribulation National Park in 1983.
Why it is worth it
The Daintree is a rainforest that reaches the sea. On the coast north of Cairns, in Far North Queensland, mountains wrapped in dense tropical forest run down to white beaches and mangrove creeks, and a few kilometres offshore lies the Great Barrier Reef — two World Heritage landscapes meeting at the waterline, a combination found almost nowhere else. The national park, established in 1981 and part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area since 1988, protects this forest in two main sections: Mossman Gorge in the south and Cape Tribulation in the north.
Its fame rests on age. The forests of the Daintree region are among the oldest continuously surviving rainforests on Earth, and they shelter an extraordinary concentration of primitive flowering plants — lineages that branched off early in the history of flowering plants and survive here as living relics. The best known is the ribbonwood, nicknamed idiot fruit, whose rediscovery in the region in 1970 made botanists realise how ancient these forests really are. Strangler figs, fan palms, giant ferns and buttress-rooted trees crowd every slope.
The animal life is as remarkable. The southern cassowary, a flightless bird as tall as a person with a casque on its head and a blue-and-red neck, walks the forest floor; Bennett's tree-kangaroo climbs in the canopy; platypus live in the creeks, and more than 430 species of birds have been recorded in the wider area. The forest is also the country of the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people, whose traditional ownership of the park was formally recognised in 2021.
At Mossman Gorge, boardwalks and tracks lead through the forest to a clear river tumbling over boulders under the trees. North of the Daintree River, the road winds through rainforest towards Cape Tribulation, where short boardwalks cross mangroves and fan-palm groves and the forest ends abruptly on the sand.
Getting there
The Mossman Gorge section is about 75 km north of Cairns along the Captain Cook Highway, beyond Port Douglas; from the Mossman Gorge visitor centre a shuttle bus covers the last 2 km into the park. For Cape Tribulation, drive about 30 km north of Mossman to the Daintree River and cross on the cable ferry, then follow the road north through the forest. Cairns, about 90 km from the park's centre, is the main base, and Cairns International Airport (CNS) is a similar distance away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Daintree National Park is located in Far North Queensland, Australia, about 100 km (62 mi) northwest of Cairns. It was founded in 1981 and is part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland. In 1988, it became a World Heritage Site. The park consists of two sections—Mossman Gorge and Cape Tribulation, with a settled agricultural area between them which includes the towns of Mossman and Daintree Village.
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