Close-ups in Far North

Port Douglas, apart from being near the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest, has its own colour behind the tourism facade. STAN DARLING meets some of the characters, including cane toads at the Ironbar.

Just call him Didier. That's enough, he says. No other names needed.

Didier stands in front of the danglers of an old banyan tree, vigorously demonstrating homemade bird calls. His table stands at a Port Douglas Sunday market crossroads. He takes advantage of the attention-grabbing position with gusto.

His voice and heavy French accent boom into the crowd. He gesticulates like a Parisian traffic gendarme as he imitates a bird. He demonstrates a pink magic worm which he once used in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, performances with the Wizard.

"Take these home!" he says to a passing New Zealander. "Guaranteed nuclear-free birdcalls!"

Didier and other stallholders might not be typical of Port Douglas, Far North Queensland, but they reflect the real community behind the tourist fronts.

Along from his table, artist Tania Heben has a quieter approach. She knows many passersby will have seen examples of her colourful work on tourist apartment walls around the tropical north Queensland town.

She says her move to the tropics helped her see colour properly for the first time.

Heben is a friend of Queensland- born actress Diane Cilento, who has a house and outdoor theatre in the hinterland not far from Port Douglas.

Heben's paintings of Queenslanders, their countryside and buildings are part of the popular art gallery and cafe at Cilento's Karnak Playhouse, which opened in 1992 inland from Mossman.

Born in Germany 65 years ago to Russian parents who moved to Australia in 1950, Heben came north to the tropics in 1987 for a six-month stay and never went back. She was a guest at Diane Cilento's rainforest compound for a while after she arrived.

Cilento - star of such movies as Tom Jones, Hombre and The Wicker Man - opened a new exhibition for her artist friend in October. She has been rehearsing at her Karnak property to tour a one-woman play about art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Cilento wrote about her life in theatre and movies and with former husband Sean Connery in her 2006 bestseller My Nine Lives.

"She told me she obviously has another life coming up" with the new play, says Heben. Woman Before A Glass has been performed in New York.

In her book, Cilento describes Port Douglas as just a "broken- down little seaside village" in 1975 when she bought a derelict farm in the area.

Everything changed after the notorious Christopher Skase built the Sheraton Mirage resort and had plantation palm trees uprooted to line the town's gateway entrance 90 kilometres north of Cairns.

Along narrow roads in sugarcane and rainforest country near Mossman, you can sometimes see Cilento driving along, wearing one of her distinctive scarves.

If you pull over to give her room to pass, you'll probably get a friendly wave. North Pole heroine

Sunday markets are a colourful diversion, but the everyday Port Douglas action takes place down the long shopping street. People who work here are just as likely to have unusual stories.

Go to Blue Heaven (a posh clothes shop), one market stallholder said. Find the first woman to walk to the North Pole.

Nicky Swan, former wife of Arctic and Antarctic adventurer Robert Swan, has lived in the Daintree region of Far North Queensland for nine years, growing cocoa and tropical fruit trees on a self-sustainable property.

She reached the North Pole in 1993, walking in a light expedition with nine men from almost 200km out.

Nicky, an environmental consultant, and the men were picked up at the Pole by a Russian helicopter and brought back. The helicopter struggled to get enough lift. "We did miles and miles at 200 feet above the ice," she says. "It was a hairy ride. That same helicopter crashed the next year, killing all on board."

She and Swan were later married.

Before the expedition, she had gotten some flak from women who said she could die out there, leaving her eight-year-old son without a mother.

"We used the polar story as an obvious analogy for survival with a practical purpose," she says. "Could I do it as a woman and use the story in a practical way?"

In a 1993 Sunday Times story, she wrote: "I felt that I could use my story to bridge the gap between environmentalists and industry . . . I might inspire people to tackle the environmental problems that threaten us all."

The expedition members were flown from Dixon, an Arctic Russian port, to a staging point "like Ice Station Zebra", says Nicky. They then crossed the pack ice in about a week, supported by neither dogs nor motorised sledges.

"At the time, we thought the ice could remain year-round until 2050," she says during a shop interview. "Now it looks more like 2013."

Robert Swan had first walked to the North Pole in 1989 with an eight- member team, three years after he had got up the noses of the American Antarctic bureaucracy when his In The Footsteps of Scott expedition reached the South Pole but had to be helped back to New Zealand because their supply ship was crushed by pack ice and sank.

Here's to toads

Cane toad racing is still a raucous nightly event at the Ironbar in Port Douglas.

It's fun, and the wary pests can do no harm wearing rubber-band undies and hopping around on a tabletop.

Each jockey gets a toad and a strict set of rules. First, you have to kiss your toad. Whether you're racing Jerry Springer, Skippy's Love Child, Gay Freddo or Mini Me (who races naked because he's too small for his undies), kissing is essential.

"One thing I've learned about Kiwis - they'll kiss just about anything," the race caller tells a new New Zealand jockey. He calls out a nine-year-old girl who cheats by kissing her hand.

"As you get older, you're going to have to kiss a hell of a lot worse."

Rule two: you make your toad jump toward the table's edge by blatting it in the bottom with your whip (a party blower).

"Two hops and he's off," calls one observer. "That frog was doped!"

"Mine's dead," complains one jockey about a slow toad.

Rule three: when your toad has leapt off the table, you must catch it and place it gently in the bucket provided. No slam dunking.

Bandit spotting

Check out the crocodile called Bandit, a Christchurch friend said. Let us know if it's tethered to an underwater concrete block so the Lady Douglas river cruise croc spotters will have a guaranteed sighting.

So we asked the riverboat skipper if Bandit was still on the payroll.

No, he's been turfed out of Dickson Inlet by another dominant male. He has migrated just a bit further north through linked waterways to a residential area called Fourmile, where he has been making news.

We checked that story out with Adrian Parbery, whose wife saw a big male parading around in April with a smaller crocodile in his mouth at the suburban Lake Estate. His victim ended up with no head or forelegs.

Parbery had warned the authorities. "I had seen little kids, without their parents, with their fishing nets on the foreshore," he says. "They are never safe."

The three-metre male, which may have been Bandit, was captured.

"The wildlife people removed him," says Parbery. "They wouldn't tell us where. Probably to a crocodile farm."

- © Fairfax NZ News