Long before it was a national park, this was - and remains - Eastern Kuku Yalanji country. The Bama people have read this rainforest for millennia: which plants heal, which fruits feed, where the rivers run and the cassowaries pass. At Mossman Gorge, Kuku Yalanji guides lead visitors on Ngadiku Dreamtime walks - 'Ngadiku' meaning stories and legends from long ago - beginning with a smoking ceremony and moving through forest their families have known forever. In September 2021, after years of negotiation, the Queensland government returned roughly 160,000 hectares, including the Daintree, to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji through their Jabalbina Yalanji corporation. It was the first time in Australia that Traditional Owners simultaneously took ownership and joint management of a UNESCO World Heritage Area. Elders wept as country came home.

The park comes in two distinct pieces, split by a settled valley of cane farms around the towns of Mossman and Daintree Village. To the south lies Mossman Gorge, the accessible face: a visitor centre, a shuttle bus, and clear cool water tumbling over granite boulders where the brave plunge in. To the north, beyond the cable ferry across the Daintree River, lies the Cape Tribulation section - wilder, harder to reach, and for many the true heart of the rainforest. Here boardwalks thread through lowland jungle, fan palms and mangroves, and the forest tumbles down to empty beaches. Most of the park is steep, trackless rainforest and mountain woodland, left deliberately to itself, a wilderness more glimpsed than entered.

Cape Tribulation carries one of the bluntest place names on the Australian coast, and it came from a very bad night. On 10 June 1770, James Cook's Endeavour scraped a reef off this headland, and hours later ran hard aground on what is now Endeavour Reef, very nearly sinking. Cook named the point Cape Tribulation, he wrote, 'because here begun all our troubles.' The surveyors who followed a century later saw only abundance. George Elphinstone Dalrymple, exploring the coast in 1873, named the Daintree River for his friend the geologist Richard Daintree, and the expedition's botanist Walter Hill pronounced the soil 'first class' and identified a new species of coconut palm. Where the navigator saw peril, the colonists saw a future empire of sugar and farms.

The Daintree is a survivor of staggering antiquity, and that is no accident of luck alone. Its lineage reaches back to the supercontinent Gondwana; as the landmass broke apart, one fragment drifted south to become frozen Antarctica while Australia carried its ancient forests north, and here, in this narrow wet strip, the old climate and the old trees held on. Plants thought long extinct have been rediscovered growing in the gloom. The park shelters more than 430 bird species, among them the wompoo fruit-dove and five other pigeons, alongside Boyd's forest dragon, the giant amethystine python, and a chorus of frogs. Watching mist rise off the canopy at dawn, you are looking at a scene very close to what dinosaurs once moved through - a living window into the deep past of the planet.