Cairns

Our destination today was Tjapukai Aboriginal Cutural Park, just outside the city. Talks, demonstrations, multi-media presentations, music, dances, and "try it" opportunities (boomerang and spear throwing - darn good thing we don't have to hunt for dinner), gave us the opportunity to find out about the culture of the local indigenous people.

Dancers skillfully imitated animals in dance stories. Trading, important in part for communicating with neighboring people without a common language, was symbolically depicted in paintings of the snake people trading abalone with the bird people. The Tjapukanydjii creation story goes something like this:

The world was created from a cassowary egg. The egg contained and released both the "wet" and the "dry." All things are either wet or dry. Some wet are crocodiles, snakes, sun, thunder. Some dry are wallabies, moon and stars. (By the way, family lines are either wet or dry, and you must marry someone from the opposite group.) In earliest time, there was only one man. His calf began to swell and a baby came from his leg. When he went to hunt for food for the baby, a woman came from the sky to nurse the baby. This happened repeatedly until the baby became a grown man. His father never knew who fed him. When the child no longer needed to be fed, the woman did not come back. The young man was very sad, so the woman returned and they married and produced more people. Two of these were brothers, one wet and one dry. The wet brother made life difficult for people, because he didn't want them to become soft and lazy. The dry brother made life easy for people. They battled, with no clear victor. It remains important to find a balance between wet and dry. (Hmmmm......I wonder which is the easy season here?)

We weren't far from Kuranda, " a village in the rainforest," so we decided to check it out.  We decided that the other name for Kuranda is Old Orchard Beach, so we didn't stay long.  So it wasn't a total waste, we decided to get some homemade mango ice cream - good, but definitely second best to Daintree Ice Cream Company.