Stephen Bailey joins a Queensland ‘mob’ to hunt crab for his dinner in a mangrove, have a go at traditional art and get better appreciation of Uluru.

“Keep stabbing the holes,” my Aboriginal guide shouts through the mangroves, unimpressed by my queasiness at the squelching mud.

Wooden spear in hand, I follow the instructions, hunting for dinner on a seemingly endless beach in Northern Queensland.

With the Great Barrier Reef a few miles offshore, trying to decapitate a mud crab wasn’t quite the marine adventure I had in mind.

We’ve already collected a smattering of strange snails and slimy crawlers, as well as unsuccessfully taken aim at stingrays.

Emerging from the creepers, my guide holds up a third crab: “$100 a kilo in the shops, but they’re in our home,” he says.

Before today, my understanding of Aboriginal culture was simplistic in the extreme. I thought the Aborigines were one. But Australia is divided into over 250 ‘countries’, each with its own indigenous language.

I’m with the Kuku Yalanji mob, rainforest dwellers and fishing experts that live on the country’s northeast coast.

Trying to decapitate a mud crab wasn’t quite the Australian marine adventure I had in mind

With his flowing hair and insatiable appetite for bush tucker, Brandon Kubirri Warra certainly looks the part, although a surfer’s board shorts suggest my guide very much lives in the 21st century.

$500 of mud crab gets boiled alive in the Kubirri Warra family kitchen, a collection of epic turtle shells watching the feast.

The edible bounty we’ve found can only be hunted by the Kuku Yalanji and that’s always been the case.

“Other mobs come to trade,” explains Brandon, “bringing whatever is plentiful in their country. But they can’t just take what’s ours”.

As white crab meat melts into my mouth I learn a further bombshell about Aboriginal diversity; every country or mob has its own language.

As a parting gift Brandon picks green bugs off a plant. Squeezing the legs and closing my eyes I chomp on the herbal centre, a powerful rush of antiseptic briefly numbing my tongue.

Who needs a pharmacy when you can shovel insects into your mouth?

They’re strangely addictive and I’m flicking two in at a time before Brandon stops me: “Not that one – it’s poisonous.”

Northern Queensland is luscious and fertile, an epic stretch of rainforest dripping into the ocean and rolling into the hinterland.

The coastal road weaves along achingly deserted beaches, cove after cove of nothing but pristine sand. With just a few steps, I go from beach to trees, entering Mossman Gorge and the Daintree Rainforest.

To the backdrop of resonant chanting I must spin around a smouldering fire. This traditional clan welcome is as quintessentially tribal as I had hoped. It’s just missing a guide in a loin cloth.

Throughout the forest there’s a use for everything: plants to eat, roots to weave baskets, sticks to build fires, leaves to make shelter. Some rocks are for men’s business and others for women’s.

There’s even a particular rock for opening nuts and a poison for arrowing possums. Then the guide mixes green leaves with water and suddenly there’s soap, something he deposits into my hands with a wry smile. What is he implying?

Artwork narrates the knowledge of the land, masterful paintings that merge absolute simplicity with unfathomable complexity.

A deaf local artist reveals his gallery to me, hundreds of paintings made from tiny dots and smudged lines. Only three colours are used in the paintings, each taken from the land and mixed with water. There’s no paintbrush, just a bamboo stick to dip on to the canvas.

I wonder if any relate to 1967, which was when Australia held a referendum to decide if Aborigines should be classified as people.

Brief instruction over and I’m left to retell my day.

This uncomplicated stick approach suits how utterly useless I am at traditional painting.

Dip it in, take it out and deposit a load more dots on the canvas.

After an hour it’s a labyrinth of confusing circles and lines. It could mean anything.

The artist’s adoration at my work suggests it might mean something. And that’s the riddle of Aboriginal art: you can read any story from thousands of little dots.

This part of Australia wasn’t where I’d expected an immersion in Aboriginal life.

My preconceptions were scorched wilderness and bare-footed nomads baking in the sun.

Uluru is a deeply spiritual place for many Aborigines: not one would dream of climbing it

In fact, my preconceptions were of where I’m standing two days later, beneath the epic frame of the world’s most famous rock.

I’m surrounded by iconic red desert, the nearest settlement some 300 miles away, and the relentless afternoon sun helping blend my skin colour into the landscape.

I’ve flown three hours into entral Australia for a rock – which sounds utterly ridiculous. But what a rock! Shimmering red and then dipping through a kaleidoscopic range of oranges, Uluru stands proud in the heart of the desert.

It used to be called Ayer’s Rock, but there’s an incumbent feeling of mystery that makes the indigenous name far more relevant. And it’s big. Huge in fact, rising 348 metres from the ground and taking half an hour to drive around its base.

Out in this desolate land, my Aboriginal bush tucker lesson is irrelevant. Ancestral knowledge is extremely localised, each mob a protector and cultivator of their land.

Trying to describe an Aborigine and their culture is like trying to accurately describe a European. To my shock, I’ve not come all this way for just one rock. Forty miles away is another collection of bizarre rock formations, the 36 domes of Kata Tjuta equally resplendent.

Like Uluru, there’s a mystical colour change at sunrise, each sandstone peak coming out of the shadows, before intriguing valleys are gradually illuminated.

Kata Tjuta is higher and aesthetically more impressive than Uluru, although everyone’s camera points the other way for the iconic monolith shot.

People climb towards the Uluru summit, ‘white ants’ using ropes to pull themselves skyward. Uluru is a deeply spiritual place for many Aboriginal mobs: not one of them would dream of climbing it, hence the derogatory nickname for those scarring it with footprints.

Covering the glimmering Uluru exterior is ancient rock art, more evocative stories igniting the history of the place. But few seem to grasp their meaning.

At the foot of the trail is a provocative sign, asking people not to climb.

It reads: ‘Is this a place to conquer – or a place to connect with?’

An English couple pause, read, throw their cigarette butts to the ground and start climbing. Still, the words resonate with my own experience in Australia.

There’s real poignancy in the ancient Aboriginal perspective. Here is a culture that has harmoniously worked with the land for many millennia.

They’ve unveiled a lesson in symbiotic coexistence, one that they’re eager to share with all visitors.