It’s easy to bag the Poms, the Ashes result conveniently forgotten of course. This week I saw an offer from the Royal Geographical Society for someone to act as “the leader of an expedition involving the study of inland or coastal waters, rivers or shallow marine environments.”

Here we are at the end of the first decade of the 21st century and the British are still mounting “expeditions”.

The princely sum of 12,500 pounds is on offer, and is available to “applicants from any nation.”

Of course, you could mount a good argument to the Royal Geographical Society for leading such an expedition into the wild rivers of Cape York (for a stint of barra fishing), out to the rare north Queensland coral reefs (to linger on the desks of a decent sized gin palace punctuated by a spot of snorkelling), or across the vast tidal sand flats between Port Douglas and Cape Tribulation (to harvest a feast of crabs and prawns for supplementation by a decent southern Australian dry white).

Some of these activities I endured last week, though without the assistance of British expedition money.

But I was aided by generous hosts from James Cook University in Cairns, who pointed me towards some very civilised dining venues, some delightful sea-side accommodation – very cheap at the moment now that the global financial crisis has dried up international tourism – and some surprisingly well managed tours to see the offshore reefs and the amazing natural heritage up and down the coast.

Freed up from British mindsets about the hostility of the tropics, one gets a sense that this part of northern Australia has got its act together in building a research-based understanding of what it means to be custodians of one of the world’s very sensitive but very special large tropical regions.

At the same time, though, there remains a very old-world, very colonial, very visible separation between white and Indigenous Australians throughout this region.

I don’t mean to pitch an arrogant southerner attitude in making such a bleedin’ obvious and pretty much unhelpful observation. My point is that after two hundred years of threatening the very existence of the delicate rainforest and reef environments of the north, our mainly British-sourced ways of doing things are changing enough such that we are at last behaving properly within these marvellous places. Yet we have much to do before we – non-Indigenous Australians – can claim to have nurtured rather than destroyed Indigenous lives and cultures in the very same country.

Phillip O'Neill, Professor and Director, Urban Research Centre, The University of Western Sydney