Littoral rainforest - the kind that grows right at the coast, shaped by salt wind and sandy soil - once fringed much of the eastern Australian seaboard. Most of it is gone, cleared for farms and stripped for mineral sand mining through the twentieth century. Iluka's grove survived, and in 1986 it was inscribed as part of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area, a chain of reserves protecting forests descended directly from those that covered the ancient southern supercontinent. More than 180 plant species crowd the reserve, from coastal dune scrub to true tropical rainforest trees, and over 140 species of bird move through the canopy. A walking track threads the whole stand, close enough to the sea that you can hear surf through the leaves.

From October through January, the forest hosts a maternity ward. A birthing colony of flying foxes gathers in the canopy, including the grey-headed flying fox and the black flying-fox - both large fruit bats, both listed as vulnerable to extinction. At dusk the mothers lift off to feed, many of them carrying babies clinging to their fur, and the sky over Iluka fills with thousands of dark wings. These animals are not pests but pollinators and seed-carriers, the unpaid gardeners that keep the rainforest reseeding itself. To stand beneath the colony at sundown is to watch one of the coast's great wildlife spectacles unfold in silence.

Iluka is also a working fishing town, and has been for generations. Oceangoing trawlers chase prawns and whiting offshore, while inside the calm water of Iluka Bay the river netters haul mullet through the close of autumn. The Clarence River Fishermen's Co-op runs its depot here - a factory, a retail shop and a chandlery serving the boats - and ships fresh seafood out to local, national and global markets. The traditional owners of this Country are the Yaegl people, whose ancestors lived around the mouth of the Clarence long before any trawler worked these grounds, reading the river and the sea with a knowledge built over thousands of years.

Iluka and Yamba face each other across the mouth of the Clarence like a pair of siblings with opposite temperaments. Yamba, on the south bank, is the bustling resort, voted Australia's number one town and packed in the holidays. Iluka, on the north, is the quiet one. A ferry runs between them, a short hop across the estuary that saves the long drive around, and the contrast on either end is the whole appeal. The two have shared this river mouth and its history for generations - Eleanor McSwan even wrote a single history of Yamba and Iluka together - yet they remain distinct: one a holiday town, the other a fishing village with a World Heritage forest at its back.

Everything about Iluka runs at a gentler tempo than the resort across the water. You reach it by turning off the Pacific Highway about 20 kilometres north of Maclean and following the road to its end at the river mouth. The town keeps a bowling club, a golf club with a quirky ten-hole course, and the Sedgers Reef Hotel. The Iluka Oval sits at the centre of things, home to cricket, the Cossacks rugby union side and the Iluka Boardriders. There is no rush here, and that is the point - the village exists in the space between long ocean beaches on one side and World Heritage rainforest on the other, and seems perfectly content to let both do the talking.