Which Aussie rainforest should be on top of your must-see list?

What's first on your wish list - the Great Otway National Park in Victoria with plenty of platypuses or the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, which David Attenborough called the "most extraordinary place on earth"? Our duelling experts are here to help.

By Mal Chenu

The "wide brown land" designation might get the headlines but Dorothea Mackellar's epic poem My Country also mentions:

Green tangle of the brushes,

Where lithe lianas coil,

And orchids deck the tree-tops

And ferns the warm dark soil.

These "green tangles" sound like rainforests to me. Decked with unique flora and fauna, Aussie rainforests are dotted along much of the east coast. Tassie is little but rainforest, but today we are concerned with Otway in Victoria and Daintree in Queensland.

Essentially, this is temperate versus tropical. One outfit per day versus several sweaty shirt switches. Peaceful, spiritual demeanour versus constant mosquito swatting. Easy to reach versus major trek. Platypi versus crocodi.

Indeed, one of the Otway rainforest's great advantages over the Daintree is that you are far less likely to be eaten by a giant saltwater crocodile. But this is far from its only salient enticement.

Great Otway National Park (the hint is in the adjective) is on the world-famous Great (there it is again) Ocean Road, Australia's most picturesque drive. Just after Apollo Bay, this great road turns inland, replacing coastal splendour with heath and hinterland.

Before long, you are immersed in giant ferns as you climb into the hills, where plains, plateaus, waterfalls, and mountain ash and old-growth eucalypt forests await. As do well-defined and dedicated walking trails.

The 800-metre accessible boardwalk of Maits Rest Rainforest Walk passes over streams, through fern gullies and by 300-year-old giant beech trees and towering Californian redwoods. The Lake Elizabeth Loop Walk wanders four kilometres through lush, undulating valleys and along the timber-flanked lake, home to a colony of platypus, which duckbill around in the shallows at dawn and dusk.

Serious hikers can tackle sections - or all - of the 100-kilometre Great Ocean Walk, which dips into the rainforest as it winds between Apollo Bay and the Twelve Apostles.

The Forrest Mountain Bike Trails in Otway Forest Park are highly rated by thrill-seekers on two wheels, who prefer their rainforests to flash by in a green blur. At Otway Fly, you can take the 600-metre treetop walk and see the rainforest from a sugar glider's point of view, or race them from tree to tree on a zipline 30 metres above the forest floor.

For the full sensory all-embracing immersion, you can pitch a tent and listen to the nighttime noises and encroaching wildlife at Lake Elizabeth, Dandos Campground, Birnam Station and Stevensons Falls Campground. Or you can leave nature to its own nocturnal devices and find a comfortable beachside stay at nearby Torquay, Anglesea, Lorne or Apollo Bay.

By Amy Cooper

Want to know which rainforest rules? Ask Sir David Attenborough, who declared the Daintree National Park "the most extraordinary place on earth". Big call, especially for a bloke who's witnessed more wow-factor wildernesses than I've had cold beverages (IE: plenty).

But we're talking possibly the most spectacular landscape in a country famed for such things; an ancient, awe-inspiring ecosystem swathed like a shimmering emerald cape over 1200 square kilometres of coast and mountain in Tropical North Queensland's Wet Tropics Heritage Area. A place so outlandishly stunning it inspired Avatar's imaginary paradise, Pandora.

The Daintree is a parallel universe of exotic, rare critters on a spectrum from pretty to petrifying; cute, white-lipped tree frogs, Bennett's tree-kangaroo and Boyd's forest dragon dwell alongside the amethystine python, which holds the 8.5-metre record for Australia's largest snake. The Daintree River is home to 70 adult saltwater crocs, including a celebrity five-metre patriarch called Scarface. This is not a place to take a dip - unless you want your last words to be "run, (rain)forest, run!" Better to take a croc cruise along the river to safely spot salties lounging on banks or among mangroves - their magnificent menace amplified by the prehistoric surrounds.

Some Daintree plants predate the dinosaurs, and would have dwarfed them, too. The endemic bull kauri, the world's tallest tropical tree, can grow to 50 metres tall with trunks up to a truck-sized three metres wide. Some are 1100 years old, living fossils unchanged since the Mesozoic era. The idiot fruit tree, which sounds like it was cultivated for politicians but is in fact named for its idiosyncratic features, has remained unchanged for 120 million years.

Hikes of all levels immerse you in the Daintree's other-worldly terrain, and you'll also gain unique insights on Dreamtime Walks with the land's traditional owners, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people. The Great Barrier Reef is right next door to the Daintree - the only place on earth with two World Heritage sites side by side. With apologies to Otway, there's just no beating that bucket-list double bill.