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Again, the bus trip south was interminable,
the excitement broken only by a visit to Gin Gin, where a
two-tyre wheel shot off a truck as it pulled into the
roadhouse, shooting past the picnic table I was occupying and
miraculously bouncing through the neighbouring caravan park
without hitting anything. As I helped the relieved trucker
roll his unexpected deposit back to his semi-trailer, I
realised that even expensive monsters like that have problems,
and for once I was glad not to have the financial and
mechanical stress associated with cars. Sure, they're well
worth the money in terms of travel quality, but a lightweight
backpack needs precious little maintenance, believe me.
Hervey Bay, my destination after the journey
from Magnetic
Island, is famous for two things: the humpback whales that
hang around in the bay during the migration season, and Fraser
Island. I was more interested in the latter, having realised
that whatever the reputation of the island as a backpackers'
haven for doing doughnuts on the beach in their 4WDs while
necking slabs of XXXX, it's a big place, and getting lost by
foot is a real possibility. (I'd been told by more than one
backpacker that Fraser Island was 'well wicked' and the only
way to see it was to rent a four-wheel-drive in which to burn
along the sandy beaches – some 20,000 vehicles visit the
island every year.) Whatever, I decided to spend a day in
Hervey Bay doing some research.
Fraser Island has a lot of very
under-publicised walking tracks, and I spent Wednesday 27th
August hunting round to find out about them, eventually
discovering the maps and leaflets I needed in the City Council
offices. For such a gateway to a popular National Park, Hervey
Bay is seriously lacking in not having an office for the
QNP&WS (Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service,
the unpronounceable acronym that equates to New Zealand's DOC
and Western Australia's CALM); all the tour operators are
geared up for 4WD tours, and foot passengers are pretty well
ignored, because they don't make anyone a fast buck. On the
other hand, this attitude means the tracks and hiker's
campsites are wonderfully empty, so I wasn't complaining.
Getting to the Island
Fraser Island is a long – a very
long – island that is about 120km from north to south, and
only about 15-20km wide, on average. The west coast, facing
the mainland, is a sandfly-infested mangrove swamp, but the
east coast, swept by north-flowing currents and trade winds,
is one big, beautiful beach; they call it Seventy-Five Mile
Beach, rather imaginatively. Having studied the maps and
trails, I decided to attempt a long walk, taking in the
central area of the island, as well as a fair stretch of
beach. If you imagine the trail being a lower-case 'd', then I
started on the left-hand edge of the d's circle, headed south
and round to the beach, then north up the beach (the d's
stalk) for some distance, eventually turning round and walking
back down the beach, to cut back into the centre via the top
of the d's circle, and back to square one. This meant I could
tailor the walk to be as long or short as I liked by altering
the distance walked up the beach (i.e. the height of the d's
stalk). It turned out to be a brilliant route.
I set off from Hervey Bay with a dangerously
heavy pack – intending to stay for eight days, I had a whole
heap of food stashed away, some 25 meals in total, plus spare
emergency rations – and hitched down to the ferry from River
Heads. This is another example of the lack of attention paid
to non-driving and non-touring visitors to Fraser Island; the
ferry leaves from River Heads, some 17km south of Hervey Bay,
but there are no buses there, so if you have no car you either
have to hitch, take a taxi, or pay three times the price to
leave from Hervey Bay itself. I hitched, and within ten
minutes I was on my way to the ferry, a little poodle sitting
in my lap, licking my legs with worrying intensity and
dedication, while I entertained the driver with idle banter
about the outback.
Day 1: Central Station
The first day on the island, I took it easy.
The secret of a long tramp is not to rush it; as you get
further into the expedition, the pack gets lighter, you get
fitter, you get used to sleeping on the ground and it
generally gets easier to walk all day. However, the first days
are always tough, and this was no exception. From the ferry,
the only track leading into the island is the road, and with
Fraser Island being entirely made out of sand (with only three
small outcrops of bedrock on the whole island), the road
walking is very hard, somewhat akin to traipsing through dune
systems. The 8km walk to Central Station – a grand-sounding
name for nothing more than a ranger station, toilet block and
campground – took me a good couple of hours, and I just
collapsed into my tent on arrival. I have to admit I was a
little worried; if all the walking was going to be this tough,
this was going to be a very long visit.
The area I walked through, though, was
indicative of interesting times to come. Starting from the
mangrove mudflats, the road winds its way through eucalyptus,
banksia and cypress pine forests, without a doubt my favourite
tramping environment after spinifex outback. There's banksia
with its odd, brushy seed cones (hence its nickname 'the loo
brush tree') and strange, serrated leaves; the gum trees with
their distinctive and refreshing smell, striking white trunks
and, at this time of year, peeling bark; the pine needles
strewn across the ground, creating a fertile mulch from which
wattles and bushes of all sorts of shapes and sizes grow...
and all this in an environment that looks parched,
nutrient-free and downright oppressive. It's a great example
of nature reclaiming the land in a far more effective way than
man ever does.
By the time I arrived at Central Station, the
gum forests had given way to closed-canopy sub-tropical
rainforest, something that I hadn't explored a great deal
before visiting Fraser Island. I saw plenty of tropical
rainforest in northern
Queensland and the islands
of the South Pacific, and mounds of temperate
rainforest in New Zealand, but sub-tropical is different
again, being a real mixture of tropical and temperate; the
canopy isn't as closed and outrageously full as in the
tropics, where vines hang from just about everywhere, but
sub-tropical has the huge fern palms and lush greenery that
isn't so common in temperate zones. The area around Central
Station is beautiful, with the wonderfully cool and clear
Wanggoolba Creek flowing over its sandy bed, past rare ferns
(found only in this one spot in the world) and through a
canopy where the sun only manages to penetrate as shards,
picking out trees and vines with the accuracy of a stage
spotlight. After setting up camp, I wandered off on a 4km
track to Pile Valley, noting with some relief that the walking
tracks in the forest are hard and easy to walk on; it's hard
to imagine that everything's sand, because the forest has laid
down such a thick layer of what we would call soil (albeit
sandy soil) that it feels no different to walk on than normal
earth.
Pile Valley is home to a strand of satinay
trees, kings of the forest with their perfectly straight, 70m
(210 ft) trunks soaring up above the canopy. Back in the bad
old days when Fraser Island was a logging site, satinay trees
were cut down for use in marine building, because they have
such a high sap content that they're resistant to rotting from
sea water, a bit like teak. Fraser's satinay was used to line
the Suez Canal in the 1920s, and luckily there are quite a few
trees left for tourists like me to stare at.
That night was bloody freezing, my first taste
of the somewhat unpredictable nature of Fraser's weather.
Clear skies mean cold weather, and I had to wear everything I
owned to stop my teeth from chattering. Luckily the family
next to me in the campground had built up a fire, so I warmed
myself by that, chatting away to the kids and parents and
gladly accepting a couple of beers to while away the night.
The first night in the bush is always fairly strenuous – roll
mats aren't mattresses, and inflatable pillows are, literally,
a pain in the neck – but the next day I was up with the worms,
and ready to take off south through the bush.
Day 2: Lake Benaroon
Day 2 was when I saw my first dingo. Every
silver lining has its cloud and every politician his
perversion, and it seems that every Queensland island has its
problem child. On Hinchinbrook
it's the rats, and on Fraser it's the dingo. Dingoes are wild
dogs, and the ones on Fraser Island are thought to be the
purest breed left, due to isolation from interbreeding with
other dogs.
Your average dingo is sleek, naturally thin,
and has all the usual mannerisms of canine kind, including the
sad, sideways tilt of the head that makes hearts melt and
grown adults speak in goo-goo language. Yes, the dingo has a
genetic ability to charm the food out of a tourist's hands,
and this has caused huge problems on Fraser Island, because
the dingoes have cottoned on. Whenever humans feed wild
animals the whole eco-structure gets upset; more food breeds
more dingoes, and when the number of humans on the island
drops in the off-season, there are too many dingoes for
natural food sources, so dingoes die off and, worse, they
start to get aggressive if humans don't hand over the
food when they sit up and beg. Fraser Island is now home to
over 200 dingo delinquents, whose daily routine involves
ripping into tents if they can smell food, and terrorising
little children who don't know how to react to wildlife (in
fact, a dingo had been shot the week before I arrived for
biting a child, a child who had apparently been baiting the
poor thing for three hours).
The guidelines, then, are strict but sensible.
Don't feed or interact with the dingoes. Don't leave any food
or rubbish inside your tent; lock it in your car. Leave your
tent flaps open, so the dingo can enter your tent, sniff
around and bugger off when it finds no food (as the ranger
told me, the worst it can do then is leave a deposit on your
sleeping bag, a prospect that, to me, sounded just as bad as
having all your food stolen). So, every time I camped, I
hoisted my backpack up a tree, well out of the range of the
dingoes, who can't jump.
And was I glad I took the precaution. On my
second day on the island, I was about to set off from Central
Station when I saw a dingo trotting off into the forest, a
plastic bag of goodies in its mouth. Following the culprit's
tracks backwards, I saw a large tent, its flaps pinned open as
suggested. The only problem was that the owners hadn't read
the small print, and they'd left everything inside the tent,
to which the dingo was slowly helping itself. As I watched, it
came back, trotted straight into the tent, and after a bit of
investigation, obviously decided that a litre carton of milk
constituted food, so, jaws clamped round the prize, it started
walking off to the forest, leaving a trail of milk behind it.
I fully assumed that by the time the owners got back from
their day's walk, all they would find would be an empty tent
with a puddle of milk in one corner. It served them right,
unfortunately.
Into the Bush
I decided to take the walking as it came, and
headed south from Central Station and through the centre of
the island to the first of the many freshwater lakes that
dominate the geography of Fraser Island. The walk took me
through more gum forest, with patches of rainforest, and I
discovered a tree that was new to me, the scribbly gum. Like
most gum trees the trunk is pure white, but the scribbly gum
gets its names from the zigzag shapes all over its trunk,
formed by burrowing insects. On first inspection it looks like
some artistic vandal has come along with a sharp knife and
scribbled on the trunks, in much the same pattern as you make
when trying to get a stubborn biro to work, but after a while
you notice the variety in the work, and it's quite hypnotic.
Combined with hiker's high – a condition that combines the
exhaustion of hiking with the meditative hypnotic effect of
regular plod-plod-plod, and which sends you off into a whole
new plane of thought as you trudge through the bush – it
proved quite a pleasant experience.
I arrived at Lake Benaroon after a fairly
quick and stress-free 7km walk, passing pretty Lake Birrabeen
on the way, and decided to stay the night in the hiker's
campsite next to the lake. I collected a sizable pile of wood
for a fire, relaxed on the beach – by definition, every
shoreline in Fraser is a beach, with beautiful white sandy
foreshores and dune systems to die for – and lit the fire at
about 4pm, ready to reduce the flames to glowing coals in time
to cook my tea. It was lining up to be the perfect night.
My companions in the campsite, a Swiss couple,
turned up just before dark, and we nattered away as darkness
fell and I munched my way through my billy of rice. And that's
when the rain started. I'd spent so much time collecting wood
and creating the perfect campfire that I was buggered if I was
going to retreat to my tent – which wasn't any drier than
standing in the rain anyway, as I'd found out in Hinchinbrook
– so I fished out my umbrella and sat by the fire, staying
perfectly dry and quite warm, thank you very much.
It was at that time, in the perfect darkness,
that a couple stumbled into the campsite. They couldn't quite
believe it; after a long struggle through the rainforest they
had arrived at the southern end of the lake, only to find it
was pissing it down (you tend not to notice things like that
when the forest canopy is protecting you) and that they still
had to find the campsite. And then they found it; and lo and
behold, there's someone sitting there, tending a good-looking
fire and sheltering under an umbrella. In all their days of
tramping, Jenni and George from Melbourne
had seen nothing quite like it, and we got on like a house on
fire, as they thought I was a real bush character with my
billy, fire and unconventional means of staying dry.
The umbrella didn't just prove useful round
the fire. By the time I got into my tent, the rain had just
settled in for a long stay, and before long the same old story
of sleeping in a puddle and getting dripped on all night
raised its ugly head. On Hinchinbrook I had simply ducked into
my sleeping bag and put up with it, but I had umbrella on the
brain, and I realised there was a solution to my problem: put
the umbrella up inside the tent. It worked a treat, with the
umbrella protecting my head, and my waterproof jacket draped
over my legs. It was almost comfortable.
Day 3: Perched Lakes
Day 3 awoke by turning over, splashing into
the puddle pooled on either side of my roll mat, and realising
that the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Like every
challenging bush experience, there's the sunny spell after the
storm, and I swear I was high on life as I draped my
belongings out on the tea trees strung along the shores of
Benaroon. You get wet, but you dry out, and the secret of the
plastic bag saved most of my belongings from a fate worse than
drowning; the Swiss couple, however, hadn't been so lucky, as
a dingo had come along at four in the morning and ripped a
hole in their tent, looking for food, and I counted myself
lucky that he hadn't decided to rip a hole in mine. Not that
it would have made any difference to the general effectiveness
of the bloody thing anyway...
The sun, coupled with the clear breezes you
get after a stormy night, made the day ripe for walking. The
first two days had served to warm up the muscles a bit, and on
day 3 I took off with a spring in my step, still heading
south. As trees crashed to the ground around me, losing
branches that the storm had broken off the night before, I
walked through more forest to Lake Boomanjin, the world's
largest perched lake.
According to the blurb, a perched lake is
formed when a saucer-shaped 'hard pad' of bonded mud, sand,
rock and peat forms in a depression between sand dunes, and
water collects there; at 200 hectares, Boomanjin is the
biggest in the world. There's no doubt that it's a wonderful
sight, which is why this was the site for the filming of the
1970s flick Eliza Fraser. A quick history lesson
might be in order; in 1836 the brig Stirling
Castle, commanded by Captain James Fraser, went down
300km north of Fraser Island, and the survivors made their way
to Fraser Island. Among them was Eliza Fraser, the captain's
wife, who managed to stay alive on the island until help came
(unlike her husband, who died). In an entrepreneurial spirit
not so common then but ubiquitous now, she wrote a book about
her experiences, which became a best seller and ensured that
the name Fraser Island stuck. Anyway, the film of the book was
made at Lake Boomanjin, so now you know.
The lake area was eerie. Odd tannin-stained
water trickled into the lake across the sand-flats, and the
wind whistled spookily across the plains. As the sun scorched
the sand and made the air shimmer gently in the distance, it
reminded me of the opening and closing scenes of High
Plains Drifter, when Clint appears riding on horseback,
ready to play his game of revenge on the town that stood idly
by while he was murdered in the main street. The only things
missing were tumbleweed and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack.
After a brief lunch stop, I changed direction
and followed the track out towards the beach, walking through
more scribbly gum forests towards the east. Every hill I
crested I'd get a tantalising glimpse of the sea in the
distance, but water being water, it's impossible to tell how
far away it is unless you have a reference point like surf or
a ship... but I was in no hurry. The wind was playing tricks,
too; forest walking is anything but quiet, and when the wind
gets up in the canopy, it sounds like the sea, a motorway and
a freshwater stream all piled into one. But when you finally
hear the sea, it's unmistakable, and bursting out onto
Seventy-Five Mile Beach down at Dilli Village (a fancy name
for one of the commercial campgrounds) was an experience,
believe me.
Seventy-Five Mile Beach
Going from closed canopy to a beach that
stretches as far as the eye can see is a shock. The beach is
very flat – when the tide goes out, it goes out a long way –
and the sea is violent, to say the least (you don't swim off
the east coast of Fraser Island, because if the rip tide
doesn't get you, the sharks will). My walk had changed from
beautiful bush to breathtaking beach, and it's this sort of
contrast that makes Fraser Island such a great place for
walking.
That night I camped 3km south of the village
of Eurong, out on the eastern beach. My feet were in serious
pain – 21.5km in a day with a still very heavy pack is hard
yakka in anyone's book – but worst of all I had an area of raw
skin in my left heel. Blisters I can handle, but when the sand
gets down your socks and rubs the skin raw, you're in trouble.
The problem is that the combination of hiker's high and a
higher exertion rate kills the feeling of pain while you're
exercising; we've all experienced the pain of stopping during
a long walk and having the feeling seep back into your feet,
and when I finally stopped to camp, I felt my feet for the
first time that day. God, they hurt.
Camping on the beach, though, was something
special. You can camp almost anywhere in the dunes along
Seventy-Five Mile Beach, and pitching the tent between the
small front dune and the larger secondary one meant I was
protected from both sea breezes (easterlies) and land winds
(westerlies), but there was enough breeze getting through to
prevent dewfall. The sound of the surf and the total lack of
people (if you ignore the 4WDs ploughing up and down the
beach, which tend to stop at nightfall anyway) made for
perfect bush camping.
Day 4: Beer on the Beach
Walking on the beach was easier than I had
anticipated. Luckily, when the tide's out, there's plenty of
firm sand near the surf where you can walk at a regular, easy
pace, something that isn't possible in dune walking (dune
walking being a complete nightmare, in anyone's book). I'd
made good time on the beach on the previous day, but as day 4
broke, my feet were still in a bad way.
Despite this, I resolved to head north some
27.5km to Eli Creek, the point I'd decided would be the
furthest north I'd reach on the beach. Walking was pure agony,
and after 14.5km I was still plodding along, thoroughly
enjoying the scenery and the environment, but concerned that I
was going to do some permanent damage to my feet by pushing on
too far. Every stop made them hurt more, but not stopping did
more damage, so what to do? That's when I heard a voice from a
bunch of Utes parked on the beach shouting, 'Hey mate! Fancy a
beer?' God moves in mysterious ways, and that day he came down
to earth as a group of fishermen.
Fraser Island is chocka with fishermen, all
going for the big catch by surf casting off the beach. I was
pleased to note that their idea of surf casting was much the
same as mine had been back in Whatipu,
except my introduction had been via vodka and coke, and theirs
was via XXXX. That stubby was probably the most enjoyable
drink I've ever quaffed, and as they forced another can on me, the conversation
flowed between me and the ten-or-so full-on Aussie blokes who
were heading north for ten days' fishing like there was no
tomorrow, which was quite a possibility given the way the two
beers went straight to my head. Not surprisingly, when they
offered me a lift to Eli Creek, I jumped at the bait like a
suicidal whiting, and twenty minutes later my walking was over
for the day. As I left the fishermen behind, them chugging
into another round of stubbies, they called after me, 'When
you write an article about us, tell 'em we love Poms, but
don't tell 'em about Fraser Island. We want it all to
ourselves, eh!' As another convoy of 4WDs ploughed past us, I
couldn't help feeling that for Fraser Island it was already
too late.
Eli Creek, the biggest freshwater creek on the
east coast of Fraser, is just amazing. Every hour of every day
it pours over four million litres of water into the sea, and
the water's been so filtered by sand that it's about as pure
as any mineral water you'll find in a bottle. Jumping into the
creek and coasting down it to the beach is a pretty damn fine
way to round off a day of beach slogging, and camping just
down from the creek proved another delightful experience.
Day 5: Waves, Wrecks and Dunes
I designated day 5 as a rest day, both
because I had planned for an extra day to spend somewhere
good, and because my feet were quite, quite buggered. Despite
it being a rest day, I wandered north up the beach for some
6.5km, but this time without a pack, and without shoes; it was
then that I realised the best way to walk on the beach is with
what the Aussies call 'beach shoes': bare feet.
As I walked along the beach, burden-free, I
really began to appreciate the beach for what it was. The
sights were strange to behold: fishermen down at the low
tidemark, dragging a rotting fish head round and round on the
sand, enticing worms to the surface which they then grabbed
round the back of the neck and dropped in a bucket for bait;
couples digging holes in the sand for pipis, little triangular
shellfish who dig into the sand, leaving a tell-tale and fatal
little mound on the surface that enables fishermen to dig them
up for bait; and, of course, there was the sea itself.
It has character, the sea. Since time
immemorial authors have waxed lyrical about the sea (myself
included), but they always talk about the ocean, the realm
of Poseidon, the storms and the swells. But what I discovered
on the beach on day 5 was the spectator sport that is Wave
Watching, and it's right up there with synchronised swimming
for raw emotion and power. After wandering the beach for days,
I discovered six types of wave, each with its own
crowd-pleasing characteristics and judge-tickling merits. The
idea of Wave Watching is to try to guess the type of wave,
with extra points if they go a long way up the beach.
First up is the Normal Wave, the one that
everyone is familiar with. Its approach to the beach is good,
its speed constant, and it breaks harmlessly and gracefully on
the waterline to a polite ripple of applause from the crowd.
Not one of life's achievers, the Normal Wave is the mainstay
of the Wave Watching scene.
Next up is the Leaping Wave. As a Normal Wave
breaks on the beach, the Leaping Wave rolls in from behind,
leaping over the stranded Normal Wave and making it all the
way to the waterline and, sometimes, beyond, filling up any
new 4WD tracks and breaking all previous records. The crowd
loves it, the TV companies thrill to the escalating viewing
figures, and if you're not careful you'll get soaked.
Type three is the Big Bastard Wave, one of the
all time favourites, but a rare sight. Breaking with foam
flecking and sand booming, the Big Bastard doesn't necessarily
make it a long way up the beach – in fact, he quite often
performs quite poorly in this respect – but he's impressive,
and the crowd is on its feet.
More common is the Stationary Wave. He's
coming up the beach, preparing to break that waterline, and he
meets another wave sliding back down the beach, taking the
track out from underneath him. The result? He just sits there,
not going forwards, not going backwards. It's a
disappointment, but it's all in the timing, and some waves
have it, and some don't. Actually, the Stationary Wave is my
favourite, because you can walk along it and get a free foot
spa without the groin-soaking experience of a Leaping
Wave.
The Backwards Wave is a real let down; like
the Stationary Wave, he meets another wave coming backwards,
but this time the sliding wave is a big one, and the new wave
ends up being swept out to sea, actually breaking backwards.
Still, every sport has its losers otherwise you couldn't have
winners.
The final category, the Head-on Wave, is one
of life's bittersweet stories. After weeks, months, maybe even
years of being built up by offshore winds, this wave is full
of confidence and energy as he bounds up to the beach. Will he
be a Big Bastard? Or maybe he'll be lucky enough to be a
Leaping Wave? But fate deals him a cruel hand; instead of
finding a nice, smooth beach to break on, he meets head-on the
freshwater Canute that is Eli Creek, and he's got no chance.
Four million litres an hour smash him back, and after all the
preparation all the Head-on Wave can do is foam at the mouth.
Eli wins every time, but the crowd loves a trier, and that's
what counts.
The Maheno
About 3.5km north of Eli Creek lies the wreck
of the Maheno. The Maheno was a
luxury passenger ship that was sold off to the Japanese for
scrap in 1935, but as it was being towed north towards its new
home, a cyclone blew it onto the beach on Fraser Island where
it still rests and rusts today. It's a weird sight that you
can see for a good hour's walk to the north and south, and at
low tide you can get right up to the wreck and, if you ignore
the warning signs, walk round inside it.
The fishermen who had plied me with beer had
their own wonderful take on events. They reckoned that the
Japs beached the wreck intentionally so that they could then
send people over to try to salvage it, and at the same time
make maps of the area in preparation for an invasion in the
war they knew was going to happen. This wonderful conspiracy
theory was apparently backed up by the fact that 'the Japs had
better maps of the east coast of Fraser Island than the
Aussies during the war', a titbit that would be interesting to
confirm or disprove. Still, one of the boys made a good point.
'It's not fuckin' hard to make a fuckin' map of this fuckin'
beach,' he said so eloquently. 'It's just a big fuckin'
straight line with a couple of fuckin' curves at each
end.'
'Bloody oath,' I muttered in agreement, as I
raised my wide-mouthed can to the sky. Sometimes you can't
beat the Aussie bloke for perception and articulation, so why
try?
The Pinnacles
A couple of kilometres north of the
Maheno are the Pinnacles, the northernmost point
that I reached on the island. As a destination, if a tramp
such as this can be said to have a destination, the Pinnacles
were a marvel. Fraser Island is world famous not only for its
fairly unique environment – rainforest thriving on nothing but
sand – but also for its actual sand, which has built up over
such a long time that it gives geologists the same feelings
that Pirelli calendars give car mechanics. For these reasons
Fraser Island is a World Heritage area and the layered coloured
sands of the Pinnacles are a vivid reminder of its deserved
standing among natural phenomena. Imagine a combination of Purnululu
and Nambung,
and you're not far off the rainbow-coloured spires of the
Pinnacles; stick in a blue sky peppered with surreal cloud
formations, and it's a postcard photographer's delight, and a
worthy and fitting destination for my rest day's walk.
The Pinnacles have a lovely Dreaming story
associated with them, too. The Butchulla people, the
Aboriginal inhabitants of Fraser Island, who call Fraser
Island k'gari (pronounced 'gurri'), tell of a girl
who left her man to go off with the rainbow man. Now the
disgruntled jilted lover was a bit of a hero when it came to
using the boomerang and spear, and he decided to hunt down his
ex and kill her, for shaming him. He eventually found her on
k'gari and threw his boomerang at her. The rainbow
man, however, threw himself in front of her in an act of
selfless love, and the boomerang hit him and shattered him
into a million pieces that fell onto the dunes of
k'gari. And that's why the sands of Fraser Island are
coloured, whatever the geologists say.
Day 6: Back Down the Beach
After spending the remainder of my rest day
watching tourists at Eli Creek and planes landing and taking
off on the beach (it's not lonely on the beach at Fraser, I
can tell you), I turned in early in preparation for a long old
walk back down the beach. Day 6 started with a 7.30am dip in
Eli Creek – a refreshing experience with no tourists around
and morning birdsong erupting round me – and before long I'd
struck camp and started wandering south, this time wearing
only my beach shoes. My feet had benefited hugely from a day
without hiking boots, and the walking was tiring but easy
enough, and to my surprise I got to Rainbow Gorge, the halfway
point, by mid-morning.
Rainbow Gorge, which I'd bypassed by getting a
lift with the fishermen, also contained examples of coloured
sand, but after the Pinnacles it visibly paled. However the
2.5km walking track round the area passed through the Kirral
sandblow, and yet again Fraser Island surprised me with its
natural beauty. Not since the moonscape of Tongariro
had I seen such desolate landscape, with miles of sand blown
into Sahara-esque dunes and mountains. Kirral lived up to its
name – the wind howled down the valley, filling my eyes, ears
and various other crevices with sand – but it added a real
atmosphere to the place as it whistled through the cypress
pines. Not since Wave
Rock has the wind felt so aboriginal and primeval...
That night, after a fairly uneventful but
thoroughly enjoyable wander down the beach for 25km, I camped
just south of where the track ducked back into the middle of
the island. The stars on the beach that night were quite
stunning, with not a cloud in the sky.
Day 7: Inland Lakes and Diana
That night, after a fairly uneventful but
thoroughly enjoyable wander down the beach for 25km, I camped
just south of where the track ducked back into the middle of
the island. The stars on the beach that night were quite
stunning, with not a cloud in the sky, and day 7, the last
full day, arrived after I'd slept the sleep of the dead.
Heading inland towards the west, I arrived at Lake Wabby at
8am, a time well before the arrival of any tourists. Lake
Wabby is an interesting place; it's the deepest lake on the
island, and it's slowly being encroached by a massive sandblow
that's moving about three metres a year into the lake. It's a
serene place, with its green water and surrounding forest, and
after a refreshing stop, I struck into the forest, heading to
Lake McKenzie, which I reached without further ado after some
14km.
Lake McKenzie is idyllic, with crystal clear
blue water, white sandy banks and a lovely camping ground
nearby, and having set up camp and secured my pack out of
reach of the dingoes, I made my way down for a swim and some
people-watching at the lake's edge. McKenzie is one of the
most popular tourist spots on the island, and watching the
ill-informed day trippers get towels and thongs stolen by the
prowling dingoes was fun in itself, especially as the rangers
had made every effort to warn people not to leave anything
around by putting up big signs plastered on all the pathways.
Then there was the Irish couple; the man dived straight into
the icy water, but the girl got up to her waist and refused to
budge any further, despite about half an hour of good natured
cajoling by her boyfriend. I even heard the Aussies sitting
next to me taking bets on whether she'd go in (she didn't) and
whether she'd put her head under (she didn't). Humans are a
wonderful species, but I wouldn't want to own one.
That night I had one other camper in the
hiker's area with me, dreadlocked Vince from Malvern, who
turned out to be a wonderful person. As he unfurled the story
of his travels, I had déjà vu after déjà vu as he described
exactly the same experiences as had befallen me. Nice job
(computer graphic designer), nice life, got bored, spent a few
months saving, sold everything and bought a one-way ticket to
Sydney, bought a cheap car and set off round Australia to
explore, would have a year in Oz and six months in Godzone and
then who knows... sound familiar? We lit a fire and boiled up
the billy – my first attempt saw a charred log collapse,
tipping the billy of water all in the fire, creating clouds of
ash and a desperately sullen fire, not a recommended course of
action – and yarned the night away.
And as you do, we got onto the subject of our
respective jobs and how we liked or disliked them. I told him
how I preferred magazine work to newspaper work because
there's more time to do a good job and, besides, on a no-news
day, newspapers will publish any old crap just to fill the
columns. 'Well,' said Vince, 'they've got plenty to write
about now, eh!'
'Whaddya mean?' I said.
'Shit, you won't have heard,' he said.
'Princess Di's dead.'
'Yeah, nice one Vince!' I replied.
'No, I'm serious,' he said. 'Car crash in
Paris. Happened a few days ago...'
'Shit...'
Amazing. It had happened on Saturday and I
only found out on Wednesday night. After the news saturation
it got in Australia, I must have been the only person in the
whole country who didn't know. As they say, 'unless you've
been on another planet, you'll know that...' Another version
is 'unless you've been bush, you'll know that...' It quite
blew my mind to be reminded so vividly just how cut off I'd
been for a week.
Day 8: Back to Hervey Bay
The next day, day 8 and the last day of my
trip to k'gari, I donated my crappy cooker and crusty
billy to Vince, who needed it more than me and promised to
give them a good home; and after a dip in Lake McKenzie, I
wound my way through the bush to Basin Lake, and from there
out to the ferry terminal. There I sweet-talked a Sydney
couple into giving me a lift from the ferry to Hervey Bay,
which they gladly did, and as I nursed my feet after their
110km of walking, I showered, washed my clothes and sunk back
into the luxuries of the western world.
Fraser Island was one of the most beautiful
walking experiences I've ever had, and I'm glad I didn't let
the 4WD tourist facade put me off. It's almost always possible
to get off the beaten track and see a lot more of a place than
the tourists will see, and although it's fun to take three
days hooning round the island in a grunting Land Cruiser, it's
much more satisfying to do it properly and by foot. Shades of
Uluru
here, I think...
Only in Australia could this
happen. Castlemaine, brewers of XXXX, the main beer in
Queensland, have just come up with the next marketing coup in
beer consumerism. Aware that Australians plough through cans
of beer like a steroid-fuelled bull in a Wedgwood store,
they've come up with the ultimate drink-delivery system, the
wide-mouthed can. Research obviously showed that conventional
can technology didn't enable beer to be poured down the throat
as quickly as desired, so XXXX cans now come with a
double-sized hole in the top, so a can can be downed in half
the time it use to take. Sceptical, I tried my first
wide-mouthed can on Seventy-Five Mile Beach, and it worked;
surely the fact that the beer disappeared quicker than ever
before had nothing to do with the fact that I'd walked 14.5km
down a burning beach. Another great Aussie invention.
World Heritage areas, like the
Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and
the Egyptian pyramids, are protected for future generations to
enjoy by the United Nations World Heritage Committee; they are
deemed to be places that, if altered, would be an
irreplaceable loss to the planet. Australia is particularly
rich in World Heritage sites; there's the Great
Barrier Reef, Kakadu,
Uluru,
Tasmania's western wilderness, the wet tropics of northern
Queensland, Shark
Bay, Fraser Island, Lord Howe Island and the Willandra
Lakes.
©
Mark Moxon
All Rights
Reserved |
