THE RUNAWAY ISLAND OF

ELIZA FRASER

            Down by the hotel pool, an exorbitantly poisonous snake was curled up, dozing rather thoughtfully among the wallum.  She was being admired by two creatures so fleshy and hairy that at first I wasn’t certain whether they were guests or attractions.  Then I heard words struggling out of the hair.

         “It’s gotta be a Taipan,” and then after a little, judicious belly-rubbing, “or a Brown.  Kills in seconds.”

         Suddenly a child swooped through the bushes, cart-wheeled over the snake and bombed the swimming pool.

         “Quit that, Murray, or I’ll belt ya”, said Pa bear “Ya might crack ya head”.

 

         I had always rather suspected that Australians didn’t hurl themselves into trees when nature appeared, poisonous and toothsome, but here at KBR or Kingfisher Bay Resort, it was reassuring to discover that nature too had stood its ground.   Somehow or other this extraordinary hotel had been tip-toed into one of the most enviromentally sensitive places that one can soberly imagine and yet even the most delicate organisms had treated it as a matter of supreme indifference.  Of course, we all did our bit to lower our profile; we drank in low-watt bars and eco-washed our hair in kiwi fruit shampoo and, when we’d had enough of anything, we would have it flushed away to the KBR worm farm to be gobbled into compost.

 

         Even the hotel buildings, all bleached timber and great swoops of glass and corrugated iron, seemed to have been set down so lightly between the mangrove swamp and the rain forest, that the wildlife had barely noticed. Whilst guests enjoyed jazz and massages, “Howling Dingo” cocktails and exuberant plates of kangaroo in Kakudu plum sauce, outside, the acid frogs - cooloola sedges and Wallum rockets - played out their fragile chemical lives.  Hot, tangy dawns were celebrated in the songs of spoonbills, drongos, tattlers, trillers and whimbrels and the kookaburras laughed at the lot of them and ate their foolish babies.  Dingos skulked around on the beach, looking for a tidal breakfast or just a little sympathy.  The honey-eaters were bolder: they dived down onto my wife, Jayne’s, lunch and, after a brief tussle, made off with the focaccia.  We were all just guests at the Garden of Eden.

 

         There was only one person on Fraser Island who could truly call himself a resident: the Tow Truck Man.  Although only 20,000 cars blundered over his jungly territory every year, his dominion was double the size of Greater London and was founded entirely in sand.  Sand was heaped twice as high as the Great Pyramid and permeated twice as deep again in to the planet’s surface.  There was more sand than the Sahara and the stuff was constantly on the move: mountainous sandblows heaved themselves across the landscape engulfing tropical forests and disgorging them, brittle and dead, several hundred years later and the whole island was creeping stealthily away from Australia.  Sand eventually swallowed everything - old loggers’ tramways, crumbly shipwrecks and, best of all, cars.

 

         “He’s rich,” said our guide grimly.  Kaye was aquaplaning down Seventy Mile Beach in a landrover painted in peanut oil.  This was a dedicated highway with a speed limit and patrols by the Queensland Police Booze Bus but those who faltered to marvel at the creeks as they gushed out of the forest would sink to their axles in sopping sand and would have to take their chances with the towman and the tides.  Despite the magnificent cavalry of surf that reared and thrashed around us, the sea was not a tempting prospect.  “Rips and sharks”, explained Kaye with admirable economy.

 

                     For all these hazards, the road was busy.  We gave way to a landrover so full of students that they had to dangle their arms, legs and clothes out of the window (“They’ll get stuck”, said Kaye) and, later, a dingo, four oyster-catchers and an aeroplane that was trying to land.

 

         At the far end of the beach, asterisked by pandanus trees, we found the Pinnacles, great, crimson cathedrals of sand which, said Kaye, were coloured by iron oxide.  I preferred the explanation of the Butchalla people, the aboriginals who once lived on Frazer; it was the blood of a heavenly boomerang accident.  For them, it was a place of Women’s Business though their surviving descendants, like Clever Woman Olga Miller, will not elaborate.  Olga, apparently, dropped by from time to time to make sure that the stories of Dreamtime were still told on the island, even if there were no longer any aboriginals to hear them.  Europeans gave them first prosaic names and then mission schools and measles and so, by 1900, they had lost their lands.

 

         On the way back, we stopped to clamber over the wreck of the liner, Maheno.  She had floundered in 1935 and her great proud crusty carcass still rumbles in its sandy grave.  In the war, the Americans had practised their bombing skills on her and the commandos of Z force (who are celebrated in the film, The Krait) punched holes in her with limpet mines.  Now, however, she is finally disappearing into the beach.  Kaye studied her appreciatively.

                  “We’ll just have to coax another liner in.”

 

         As we climbed away from the beach and up into the forest, I became increasingly uneasy at the thought that I didn’t really understand Fraser Island at all.  Up here, fresh sweet water bubbled out of the sandy hills after a century underground.  From here, we watched it slide away, down silent, stoneless creeks through gardens of strangler figs and picabeens, down to the Coral Sea.  Here, too, were fantastic prehistoric ferns, unchanged for millions of years, trees 60 metres high, trees germinated by fire, trees 1200 years old and trees so resistant to sea water that they were once hauled round the world to build London Docks and the Suez Canal - all thriving in a scrape of enriched sand: Satinay, Blackbutt, Banksia and Boxbrush.  There was the scribbly gum tree with its own artistic moth to make Jackson Pollocks of its bark, the hermaphroditic casuarina, the pig-face creeper and the macrozamia, whose “pineapples” could be leached of their poisons and baked into a damper.  The Butchalla had called the island K’gari - Paradise.

 

         At Wanggoolba Creek, Kaye produced a picnic of cold chicken and Chardonnay which she laid out on a white damask in a glade of luxuriant ferns, epiphytes and buttresses.  I wondered why the name had ever changed to Fraser Island.  Eliza Fraser was shipwrecked here on “The Stirling Castle” in 1836.  The crew, including her husband, the Captain, were rescued by aboriginals and then slaughtered.  Eliza was spared although tongues still wag as to what exactly she had offered the Butchalla.  She was rescued by an escaped convict and returned to London where she died from over-talking.  It’s puzzling why Paradise was given her name.

 

         But most mysterious of all were the islands forty ‘perched’ lakes.  These huge expanses of black and turquoise water dangled, high above the watertable, up in the sandhills.  The Butchalla took the view that they were the eyes of a goddess and no-one, since then, has come up with a more appealing explanation.  At Lake Wabby we swam with the doomed catfish, whose successors will one day be smothered by the Hammerstone sandblow.  Later, at Lake McKenzie, Jayne declared that this was the most beautiful place that she had ever swum and we slipped, rather meekly, into the fabulous, turquoise water with the young Australians - coppery, muscular, careless and topless.  Kaye retreated into the shade of a paper bark tree and read The Courier: it reaffirmed that there was indeed a miserable world beyond Queensland but that its inhabitants were pathetic at sport.

 

         A family of dingos ambled up the beach, sniffing the air for barbecues.  These were the purest dingos in Australia, skinny, hopeful creatures with a taste for picnics, bandicoots and flailing arms.

         “Ignore them,” advised Kaye “and they get bored,”

         We studied our hands and scoured the horizon for turtles.  We admired the sand again and agreed that this was Burning Sun and, sure enough, the dingos little, how-much-is-that-doggy faces were soon furrowed with boredom and they drifted away.

         Kaye read our thoughts; yes, they could carry a baby away but no they’d never have undone all those buttons on the matinee jacket.

 

         In the evening she returned us to KBR.  The sky turned purple and the air crackled and fizzed with insects, fruit bats and sugar gliders.  Pa Bear sat on the end of the jetty, chewing his way through a “slab” of beers whilst Murray fished for Sweet Lip.  In the Maheno restaurant, a family of Norwegians were excavating their way into a sumptuous hummock of shellfish whilst, above them, a pair of honey-eaters were building a hot, electric nest in a chandelier.  A new waitress, just up from Sydney,  had had her bottom scratched by an over-friendly dingo but she, like Eliza Fraser, had already reasoned that a little loss of dignity was a small price to pay for a place in Paradise.

FRASER ISLAND FACTBOX