Living in a Rainforest

There are many good things about living in a rainforest, and some downsides, but first the good things.

1)  Having the green of a forest around promotes calmness and wellness leading to contentment.  Having lived here for 46 years, I add my anecdotal evidence for that hypothesis.  It is easy to be calm here.  To let things go that might wind up a city dweller already loaded with daily stress.

2)  It is naturally air-conditioned as only about 5% of sunlight reaches the forest floor and that is at midday.  Morning and evening virtually none reaches the ground.  The leaves transpire the heat away.  Reliably 2C cooler than Atherton and 6C cooler than the coast.

3)  It is interesting and complex with ever more to see and learn.  Little is known about the vast numbers of fungi that perform vital tasks but remain unseen until they break through with their fruiting bodies in an amazing display of shapes and colours.  Every startling colour but green.

4)  Kids of all ages love the rushing creeks and mighty trees.  There is mystery, as no vantage point exists where you can see more than a tiny fraction of the landscape.  There could always be something new along the track.  I felt the mystery when I first came here looking for a block of land.  I still feel it.  I can still go exploring on my own property and wonder what I will find.

5)  The birds and wildlife delight and entertain us and their endevours inform us of the important things in life.  Food, shelter, mates and belonging to a society with relationships branching out to friendship and conflict.

6)   The quietness which expands your senses to be aware of the busy insects and the squabbles of cockatoos on the next ridge.  Or the crunch of gravel from half a kilometer away that alerts me to the arrival of guests.

7)  The change of seasons and each species’ response to it.  The frogs getting amorous and croaking to attract mates, fireflies and termite swarms, birds busy building nests or bowers,  Snakes and turkeys basking in the sun after a long rainy spell where they fling themselves down on their backs with wings spread.  Like Scandinavian tourists Flocking to Spain in May after a long dark winter.

8) Surprising glimpses like cacophonous turf war between crimson rosellas and currawongs that goes on for an hour of pitched battle.  Welcome swallows spending days teaching their fledglings to fly.  A juvenile Victoria’s rifle bird entertaining birds of another species for 10 minutes as he practises his dance.  A battle to the death between a mud wasp and a large spider right on my veranda.

9)  A chance to do my own thing at my own pace and build my own home and sheds with no interference from authorities.  I did eventually tell the council about Blackbean Cottage ….. 25 years later.

10)  I don’t have droughts.  For a couple of months in 40 years I have been short of enough water to run the hydro system, but always enough for general use.

There are some negatives when living a rainforest.

1)  It rains a lot.  You probably figured that out, but that means 210 days a year which means it more often rains than not.  The total yearly rainfall a reasonable 2100 mm.  This restricts my activities as many jobs are not worth attempting in the rain or too mucky, horrible or dangerous to contemplate.

2)  The leeches are present for 80% of the year.  Only in the short dry season do they sulk underground in wet gullies.  They do no harm and are easily dealt with but cause a great amount of undue alarm for some of my guests.  My daughters and grandkids brought up here just ‘pick and flick’ with it hardly deserving their attention.

3)  The damp atmosphere causes mold, damp sheets and doors to de-laminate.  I take my hat off to mold as the oldest form of life and still surviving in the most hostile of environments.  Such as on the windows of space-lab.  A quick wipe did not help visibility as it was on the outside!  Also found growing in the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl reactor where it was using radiation 500 times what a human could survive as an energy source.

4)  Lack of sun and stars.  I can go a month without being able to see the next ridge because of mist and drizzle and yearn to see an astronomical object like the sun.

5)  Everything grows so fast here.  Sun, rain and warmth make for year round growth and I have to work at pushing it back or the buildings will be engulfed.  It’s like “Day of the Trifids”.  Turn my back for a little while and a tree has grown behind me.  I have 2 kms of track to hack with a machete.  Fortunately I have some assistance with slave labour.  My grandkids, who I equipped with their own machetes since they were 4.

6)  Cyclones.  I have been directly hit (in the eye wall), by several intense cyclones and had an awful lot of cleaning up of vegetation to do, but little costly damage as partly sheltered by the rainforest.  The local council has been heroic in cleaning up the track in with hundreds of trees across it.

7)  I have run out of cons and the rainforest is a great place to live.

How I got Here

By a very random path backpacking around the world, but always on my own track going in the direction I wanted and considering money only as an irksome tool I had to find by labouring jobs along the way.  So I headed straight to my goals of travelling, getting a property etc with side trips such as construction worker, ski lift operator, exploration field assistant and spud digger along the way.  These side trips were interesting and enlightening in their own right, and all the better for being only temporary.  I have never worried about money as I am fortunate enough to have come from a rich country and live in a rich country so I always had food, albeit rice and beans.  So I went directly towards my own goals using my own labour and avoiding the money traps of tax, loans, fees, interest, insurance, etc, etc.  The vast financial industry seems to me like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up money from the workers to the financial elite.  I fear your chances of avoiding the money traps is decreasing with time as the elites plug the holes and achieve their goal of banishing cash.  Then every transaction will pass through their hands and your ticket clipped  by computers shaving a small percentage at every stage.