You Need to Find Faith to Live Off-Grid in Far North Queensland

Explorer Amy recently spent six weeks housesitting in an off-grid community in Far North Queensland. The land and locals taught her many lessons about society, connection, and faith.

 

We Are Explorers acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the Countries on which these adventures take place who have occupied and cared for these lands, waters, and their inhabitants for thousands of years. We pay our respects to them and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

‘I don’t know how anyone could live here without faith,’ says the woman with long grey plaits, a nose ring, and wild eyes. ‘The fear would eat you alive.’

She’s talking to me in her Papua New Guinean-style open-plan kitchen. She and her husband have just cooked us a dinner of sesame-crusted prawns. The prawns, like everything else here, were caught by a friend.

‘Here’ is one of the most remote places in the country. I’ve been house-sitting here for a month now, and I’ve heard faith mentioned often.

In the same week, on a white sand beach in the middle of seemingly nowhere, the woman’s husband tells me tales about growing up in New Guinea. He said that when they introduced western medicine into the villages, a lot of the superstitious practices previously thought to keep them safe dissipated.

Faith – it would seem – is the way humans cope with the unknown. He tells me this while I watch my boyfriend cast his line at the water’s edge. I quietly pray he’s scanned it sufficiently for crocs; or ‘lizards’, as they’re affectionately known in these parts.

Off-Grid Living in the Tropical North

Bought in the 1980s by a rag-tag group of hippies for a measly sum of money, the land we’re on has somehow survived and grown into a proud, self-sufficient, off-grid community. The former cattle station has been reforested and is now part of the sprawling green expanse of Cape York.

Signs of human life are seen only in a few dirt roads and a few dozen dwellings of varying complexity. The land surrounding it has mostly been given back to the Traditional Owners or granted to national parks.

While putting down the river looking for barra snags – protruding logs that your line gets tangled up in, but also that the fish like to live in – a young man in King Gee camo workwear points out the dense old growth rainforest where he initially contemplated putting his house. In the end, he just couldn’t do it.

‘I love the trees too much’, he says.

Trained in forestry, he worked for the government planting trees, for mines in Africa drilling bore holes, and now on a neighbouring island collecting seeds for their mine site rehabilitation.

‘9 to 5 just wasn’t for me’, he reflects.

What is for him is this river. He knows every bend the way I know the rock formations on the beaches back home. When I say I need to go to the toilet, he detours back to a perfect opening in the otherwise dense vegetation.

I climb out onto the sand and while I squat, I admire the high, densely-rooted walls which (presumably) protect me from unwanted lizard visitors. It doesn’t protect me from my boyfriend though, who decides to film the whole ungraceful thing.

Once he’s caught one barra and dropped another we head back upstream. On the way, we pass a section of boulders emerging from crystal marine water that mermaids would frolic in if it was a Disney movie. But it’s not, it’s Far North Queensland and there’s a young, lithe, Saltwater crocodile sunning itself on the exposed marble.

Read more: How To Stay Safe in Croc Country

Back at the skipper’s wooden house, built with no walls but a fridge full of beer, he reaffirms that you can’t live here on your own.

‘It’s not long before you need to borrow a cup of sugar’, he tells me.

Or a set of chains to tow a broken-down friend along the dirt, pock-marked road; or a post hole pincer to build a new shed; or a multimeter to measure the voltage on your broken solar regulator. A lot can, and does, go wrong.

The man with the proverbial sugar, and the will to lend it out, is an old-world soul with a handlebar moustache and crocodile skins on his dashboard. He has a 1973 Cherokee plane with red leather interiors sitting in the hangar of the airport, which he built – with help of course – and a pool table in his garage.

While we play two a side, drinking his home-brewed port and listening to So Fresh Hits of 2013, he tells us about how everything on his allocated plot of land was bought in on a truck and assembled by his hand. His house wouldn’t be out of place in the ritziest suburbs in Cairns, which makes this even more impressive.

It seems it isn’t simplicity he’s seeking, but the space to reap the fruits of his labour without anyone interfering.

‘Everything we do here, we do ourselves’, his wife had told me earlier, while she showed me how to make hand towels out of old T-shirts.

Far From Society, But Not From Community

The thickness of their dependence means getting things done isn’t always easy.

In my time, I hear rumbling tension between the 35 shareholders; about who’ll maintain the roads and man the fire brigade, now that the old guard is getting tired; about whether the collective can claim access to a privately built boat ramp; about whether building a second airport was a good idea; about whether to back burn before fire season.

For some, living alone would be preferable, but impossible given the cost.

They use the space that the community affords to hide away from a society which has done them wrong, instead talking to animals, playing video games, and shoring themselves up with theories that confirm the worst traits of human beings.

On one particularly sweaty afternoon, a stocky man with heavy-set eyes and a dog which could pass as a small kangaroo, grills me for irrationally refusing to believe in The New World Order – in the great conspiracy controlling my life.

From the owners of the home in which I’m currently living, I feel a deep sense of warmth and love towards other human beings.

Every morning they listen to the radio and check Facebook messages from family and friends to stay up to date. They tell me about the new generation of people returning to live in the community, and the street library they want to build at the new homestead.

Their faith is not found in a lord above, but in the capacity of their fellow humans for connection over consumption. Living here allows them to experience this daily; it is its own kind of faith.

Finding Faith in the Forest

When I look at the forest walls which rise up from the river, I wonder at how such a dense variety of species don’t simply smother each other in their desperate pursuit of the sunlight. Sometimes, it can seem overwhelmingly claustrophobic, and the need to clear the land and pacify the people is visceral.

Between the microbats that fly over my head at night and the Green Tree frogs that jump under my feet on the way to the bathroom, finding peace in dissonance is a daily practice.

Keeping your eyes on the big picture is key, because as a wise woman once said to me on a bumpy buggy ride;

Whether it’s a god, nature, freedom, politics or family, we must all be sustained by something. Out here, at the edge of the country, in the prehistoric rainforest that time forgot, a small group of people are living with the ferocity that forgoing society, but not sociality, demands.

I learnt a lot from them and their land about faith, but mostly about the courage it takes to love, and therefore, to live.

Read more: Kind Strangers Are What Make a Trip Truly Unforgettable

Photos thanks to @bette_smidler