fraser island australia
Set alongside Australia’s Queensland coast is a mysterious island, fiercely unique and wild.
Part of the Great Sandy National Park, Fraser Island is home to the world’s oldest dunes. However, this is no typical subtropical paradise. Stretching 123 kilometres (76 miles) long and 22 kilometres (14 miles) wide, at 184,000 hectares (454,674 acres), Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world. More than that, dressed in luscious layers of foliage, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is the planet’s only sand island to boast a rainforest. It is an island in motion, an ever-evolving snapshot of nature at its most innovative and raw.
Fraser Island sits along the Fraser Coast, 300 kilometres (186 miles) north of Brisbane. While road-trippers board the Manta Ray Barge from Inskip Point, ramblers often prefer to take the more leisurely 50-minute Fraser Island Barge, from River Heads, 20 minutes south of Hervey Bay. Truly daring souls may even opt for the scenic, albeit tiny, Air Fraser Island plane. No matter how it is reached, a good starting point is to stock up on supplies at the settlements of Eurong, Happy Valley, Cathedrals or Orchid Beach though visitors are advised to bring medical kits and water with them when they visit.
From here, Fraser Island, known by its aboriginal name of K’gari, is best enjoyed aboard a four-wheel drive (or 4WD), throttling along its 250-kilometre (155-mile) shoreline, rocky roads and looming rainforests. However, the island’s great lure is as a socket to connect to nature and it could be argued that the only way to truly do so is the 90-kilometre (56-mile), six-day Fraser Island Great Walk, from the northeastern Happy Valley to the southeastern Dilli Village with plenty of camping breaks along the way. For casual walkers, the journey can also be enjoyed in chunks ranging from a few hours to an overnight trek.
Along the way, the island unveils its hidden gems, not so much diamonds in the rough, as perpetual masterpieces, forever in perfection. The island’s most immediately staggering feature is its rainforest. Across Pile Valley, which has survived some serious deforestation, giant satinay trees stretch straight towards the clear blue sky, alongside the brush box, spreading outwards like bursts of green clouds. They are joined by thin piccabeen palms with outstretched feathery fronds, and cherry satinash, sprouting a popular‘bush food’, along with the resilient blush satinash, abloom with fluffy, white flowers. Elsewhere, Wanggoolba Creek is shaded beneath a walkway of rare king ferns, holding their leaning fronds up using water pressure.
Behind the northeastern lookout of Waddy Point, the subtropical rainforest is characterised by the scribbly gum a light-coloured eucalyptus tree, with dark scribbles drawn up by the scribbly moth’s larvae. These are kept company by the red bloodwood, an evergreen reaching heights of 35 metres (115 feet), oozing with an essential oil much-coveted in aboriginal herbal medicine. While Fraser Island’s choppy seas are considered unsafe for swimming, the nearby Champagne Pools create a natural set of swimming holes along the shoreline. Looking east towards the Coral Sea, it is the only place one can enjoy the island’s saltwater especially during low-tide, when the pools are lapped only by soft waves, hauling in the occasional fish.
One of the island’s more curious wonders is its 40 kilometres (25 miles) of coloured sandy cliffs. Known as The Pinnacles, they are believed by the indigenous Butchulla people to have been created by the Rainbow Serpent. Heading south towards Eli Creek, 72 shades of sand dance from red to yellow, ushering in the wreck of the SS Maheno an early turbine-driven steamer, which was swept away in 1935 while being dragged to Japan. It is just one of 23 ships to have been wrecked against Fraser Island between 1856 and 1935 even after the construction of the island’s northern Sandy Cape Lighthouse in 1870.
Further afield, Hammerstone Sandblow, one of the island’s enormous, ever-shifting dunes, leads into Lake Wabby. The island’s deepest lake is also an anomaly both technically a window lake, which sits beneath water level, and a barrage lake formed when the Hammerstone created a natural dam against a creek. It is also the island’s only lake that supports aquatic life, but in the next century will most likely be swallowed by the dune that created it.
Altogether, the island’s lakes are exceptional in size, diversity and age. Inland, Fraser’s Lake McKenzie splits the rainforest, like an enormous oasis. The perched lake is fed not by groundwater but rainwater, sitting between dunes, atop the silky smooth white silica sand below which not only filters the water crystal clear, but feels positively delightful beneath treading feet.
Lake Boomanjin is also a bizarre beast. Quieter than its counterparts, at 190 hectares (470 acres), it is both the world’s largest perched lake, and the highest, 130 metres (427 feet) above sea level. However, not content to break records, Boomanjin also boasts a surreal gradient of reddish hues tea tree red, to be precise an effect created by stripping tannin from the surrounding tea trees.
The island’s unusual landscapes have created a fittingly unfamiliar ecosystem, where the purest strain of eastern Australian dingoes call home. Roughly 50 mammals are spread across Fraser Island’s rainforests, mangroves, swamps, woodlands, heaths and shorelines. They include the elusive swamp wallaby, which scurries amid the scant grass and the sheepish short-beaked echidna, with its long spines.
Come evening, visitors can go on an openair tour of the island’s all-night party critters, such as the black-and-white sugar glider, a tiny possum capable of crossing half a football pitch in one flight. The island also counts around 80 types of reptile among its population, including 20 species of snake, ‘acid frogs’ accustomed to acidic water, and sand and lace monitors, which tend to linger around picnic areas.
Aside from hundreds of bird species, the island is also perfectly positioned for whalewatching excursions, as migrating humpbacks flee the Antarctic to give birth in Australia’s warmer waters. The only sight more delightful than humpback whales are humpback whales swimming alongside their calves a shining example of life at the edge of the world.