Tablelands and Crater Lakes

Up on the high Tablelands behind Townsville and Cairns the last remnants of Mabi Forest (Complex Notophyll Vine Forests) are strewn in fragments across the rolling grassy landscape. Like the Lake District the Tableland scenery is largely man-made. Unlike the Lakes where deforestation has taken a 1000 years of clearance, the Tableland has been denuded in a tenth of the time.
 It is intensely agricultural with cattle, dairy herds, some sugar cane, mangroves, coffee, peanuts. All that is left of the upland wet forest lies on marginal ground.
Two Crater Lakes, Lake Barrine and Lake Eacham still have a dark green necklace around their still blue waters, home to Bower birds, Tree kangaroos, and fireflies but these and other small areas have been disconnected from each other by fields leaving animals stranded in beautiful but very quickly unsustainable islands.
Lake Eacham has a forest walk all around it and is my favourite bathing place in the Tablelands. At the weekends it is busy with families making BBQ’s and children splashing off the steps, but during the week it is a quiet enough for the water dragons to peer shyly from behind trees and the water turtles to sunbathe on partially submerged trees.