My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  At six o’clock on an early May morning I looked out across the palm trees and jetties of Townsville, Queensland, out to the bulk of Magnetic Island sprawled, snout to the sea, like a duck-billed platypus. A few hours later I was flying above it heading over the fine ocean to a small speck unromantically called Dunk.

  The plane was one of those affectionately known, in the inimitable manner of Australian nicknames, as Bushies, and it still had BPA (Bush Pilots Airways) painted on its nose, although it had recently become part of Queensland Airways, possibly more businesslike but less adventurous.

  Beneath the wing the isles trotted by like stepping stones, most of them small and green with a boomerang of white beach, a turquoise anchorage and perhaps a single boat. Over to port, gathering to itself the clouds from miles around, was the large emerald hump of Hinchinbrook. Dunk Island, although small, rose sharply like a lad stretching to his full height. We went in across the reef and the lagoon, hooped in various bands of blue, and landed on the strip beside the palms.

  Dunk has its resort hotel, distributed along the fine beach. Some of the islands have confined holiday colonies like this, but the remainder of the land is left to the native wild. Man has had little choice about where to settle, for the jungle has grown through the centuries and it chokes hills and fills ravines. This was once the untouched place where natives used nuggets of gold as sinkers on their fishing lines.

  Crowning Dunk, in fact comprising the greater area of Dunk, is Mount Koo-Tal-Oo which is nothing less than 900 feet of jungle. It was a heavily hot day and I had no intention of climbing it. In fact, I was rather looking forward to an easy time, almost a day off after weeks of travelling. I thought I might have an idle lunch and a few glasses of wine, swim and perhaps take a trip in a glass-bottomed boat to view in comfort the varied wonders of the deep. But it was not to be.

  The trouble began because of a man called Banfield, an English writer, who had lived a Crusoe existence on Dunk Island in the early part of this century and had recorded his experiences in a book called The Confessions of a Beachcomber. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, he was buried on his sanctuary and I wanted to see his grave.

  ‘It’s just up there,’ pointed a young lady from the hotel. ‘See?’ All I could see was the mass of the jungled mountain towering ahead and I should have remembered that when an Australian says, ‘Just up there,’ or ‘Just along there,’ it could mean 500 yards or 500 miles.

  Clad in jeans, a shirt, tennis shoes and carrying my camera and tape recorder I intrepidly set out. At once I became lost. The paths that went into the bush doubled back on themselves, there was a notice warning that the ‘swinging bridge’ was unsafe, and there were muddy rivulets sweating down the flank of the hill after recent rains. I retraced my steps and another accommodating member of the hotel staff showed me a short cut and off I went again.

  It was steaming. There were trees fallen across the steep, slippery paths, like dead men on a battlefield, and apart from an arthritic hip, I had a cracked rib sustained when I fell out of the bath in New Zealand. (I ask you, would Livingstone, or Burton, or Scott have fallen out of a bath?) Up and up went the path until it came to the swinging bridge, with branches across it and the warning. ‘Closed, Bridge Dangerous.’

  There was no going back. It was too far and too difficult. I climbed over and gingerly as a man on a tightrope went across the thing. My God, I soon knew why they called it the swinging bridge. It swayed like a skipping rope at every tentative step. Halfway across, staring down into a chasm with a stream running between a gut of rocks, I wondered briefly if I had done the sensible thing. By that time it was as easy (or rather, as difficult) to keep going as it was to retire, so I continued, the crazy structure groaning and squeaking at every shift of my weight. Gratefully I reached the other bank where I found a pretty young lady dressed in a leopard skin, just like Tarzan’s Jane. It turned out that she had come from the hotel, not hand-over-hand through the trees, but by means of a perfectly reasonable set of stone steps which I had not detected. Yes, she confirmed, the grave of Banfield was ‘just up there’.

  Just up there I went. And just up there . . . and just up there . . . and just up there. Sweat trickled from me like the streams that wriggled down the thick hillside and over the path. I found a notice which said, ‘Mount Koo-Tal-Oo 2 kilometres. Allow Two Hours.’ That sounded ridiculous. Two hours for two kilometres? Then I saw that some disgruntled climber had amended the two hours to twelve hours. Upwards, onwards I pressed.

  After an hour I thought I might be touching delirium because I had a strong temptation to shout for him. ‘Banfield! Banfield – where are you?’ What an idiotic place to put a dead man.

  Another twenty minutes and I had to stop and take off my trousers. They were jeans meant for knocking around English harbours in winter and tramping over windy fields. I sat on a fallen trunk and pulled them down to my ankles. I was wearing a pair of swimming shorts underneath, not that it mattered in that wilderness. There were ants the size of mice living on the tree stump and they became interested in my revealed legs. Jeans still fixed around my ankles, I was struggling to pull them over my tennis shoes when I got that shady sort of feeling that someone was watching. I looked up. Sitting on the muddy path, four feet away, its head raised and its tongue flicking expectantly, was a long brown snake.

  It was difficult to freeze in that heat, but I froze. Standing there in that farcical childlike pose, trousers down, shirt dangling, I froze. The snake was waving about, its spread tongue still going in and out. God, I thought, he’s looking at my legs! I was too scared to move. They’re killers, the brown ones . . . hadn’t a man on the mainland been bitten and died only a few days before . . . if only I could pull my damned trousers up! I had a funny vision of lying in my death throes at the side of the track, trying to tell the story into my tape recorder, perhaps adding a final message to my wife, my family and my dog far away in England: trying to pull up the trousers so that I would die decent.

  Then (oh, thank you very much God!) the snake apparently remembered something it had to do. It turned and began to slide slowly across the path and into the bush. My next fear arrived immediately – nobody would believe me! I grabbed the camera and, trousers still dangling, fired off three exposures before the snake finally sidled away. Then I pulled up my trousers.

  It took me another half an hour to get to the top of the mountain (a quaint sign said, ‘Summit – Four Chains’ but I couldn’t remember how long a chain was). Nor could I see a sign of Banfield anywhere. I was very annoyed with him. It was touch and go that there were not two dead authors up there. I turned and began to descend.

  In another hour and a half I stumbled out onto the beach and, empty, exhausted and streaming with sweat, walked into the sea and lay there letting it wash wonderfully over me. Then I made for the hotel, gulped a lot of beer and, seeing the lady who had directed me to Banfield’s grave, told her of my adventures. ‘The top of the mountain?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘I told you it was just over there – and I meant just over there. I’ll show you.’

  She did. It was all of 150 yards, tucked into the fringe of the bush. I had missed it by taking the recommended short cut. I thought I could hear old Banfield laughing. His stone has a version of that quotation by Thoreau:

  If a man does not keep pace with his companions,

  Perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

  Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or

  far away.

  I had certainly followed a different drummer that day.

  Nor was the day finished with me yet. Back at Townsville airport on the mainland I rented a car for the 250-mile drive south to Shute Harbour from which I proposed to explore the Whitsunday Islands. There’s really only one road – Highway One – which goes due north and south. Nothing could be simpler than that, could it? But it was my day for going the wrong way. With no signs, no habitations, and a dark night, it was thirty miles before I pulled into
a far-out hotel and discovered my mistake. ‘Never mind, mate,’ consoled the barman. ‘You’ve come to a bloody good pub.’

  There are times when I think I’ll never make an explorer.

  There are travellers who say that – notwithstanding Niagara Falls, the Grand Canal or Lake Windermere – the Whitsunday Passage is the world’s most beautiful piece of water. Cook thought so, cruising in the Endeavour between the misty and mystic islands. ‘This passage,’ he recorded in his log, ‘I have named the Whit Sunday Passage as it was discovered on the day the Church commemorates that Festival, and the Isles which form it, Cumberland Isles, in honour of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland.’ The date was 4 June 1770.

  Today the Cumberland Islands are a fragmentary collection to the south and the main spread of isles just off the Queensland shore are now called the Whitsunday Group. When I first saw them from the shore at Shute Harbour they looked positively Hebridean, dark and pinnacled, and curtained with rain. The storm came out of an early, brooding sky and rushed across the harbour, throwing up the waves, and swallowing the horizon. No one at homely Shute Harbour seemed concerned. They were loading the boats for the islands, fruit, vegetables, crates and casks.

  The small place was all pleasant activity. The rain retreated and sun swept across the landscape of Queensland, the ocean and the gleaming islands. I could hardly wait to go out to them.

  It has to be said that the Australians, with one of the world’s most wondrously scenic countries, are sometimes inclined to spoil their delectable place with commercialism. Some of the tourist brochures extolling the islands within the Barrier Reef have a holiday-camp blatancy. There are photographs of hotels, food and people playing bingo, snooker and ping pong. And outside . . . outside is all that!

  Among the vessels at Shute Harbour was a ‘horror’ ship, painted all over with a sort of tawdry graffiti and with, so I was told, imitation grass and palm tress in her saloon! She was once a decent working ferry in Tasmania, but she has now, literally, been tarted up, and has been renamed The Happy Hooker. She transports riotous parties of trippers around the dignified islands. I asked one of the Shute Harbour sailors what he thought of the monstrosity. ‘I dunno,’ he said carefully. ‘I hear she handles well.’

  A more sober vessel, called Telford Wanderer, three decks and a chimney like a kitchen stove, took me to the Whitsunday Islands, coming out of the sheltered clasp of Shute Harbour and into the bottle-green sea. By now the sky had been cleaned up by a sweeping wind that was still running through the passage. It is an enchanting place, the wide channel, hillocks of sea, shapes of the many islands, the silhouette of each one lying across the next, the further the distance the paler the shade of grey. I thought how thrilling it must have been for Cook to have been the first foreign man to have found himself in that isthmus. A small hand of isles, the Molle Group, were on the landward side of the channel, jaunty, camel-backed, with trees on their slopes and bright yellow beaches. There are South Molle, Middle Molle and North Molle; there is also West Molle, which has been damned with the name of Daydream Island in the interests of tourism (like Happy Bay). I was told that Daydream has been renamed because of a schooner which used to call there; well, all I can say is that Daydream sounds less phoney on a ship than an island. West Molle was a decent name. Why change it? South Molle also has a resort hotel but has retained its name and it is none the worse for that.

  On the distant flank of the passage, and it took Telford Wanderer three-quarters of an hour to make the crossing, are the more muscular islands – Hook, Whitsunday itself and Lindeman, with the smaller isles of Hayman, Haslewood and Shaw. Beyond them are the myriad shoals of the true Barrier Reef.

  On Hook Island there is an underwater observatory, a lighthouse in reverse, because it curls down below the sea-bed. There’s a nice unofficial jetty and the round tower is at its end. You go down the spiral staircase into the iron chamber sitting on the sea-bed. Through a series of glass panels, rather like the screens of television sets, you can look out at the fish looking in at you. They loiter there in their hundreds, obese, silver, goggle-eyed creatures, long, languid monsters, little lost fish searching for someone among the crowd, and millions of tiny creatures, all moving the same way at once, all turning at the same invisible corner and then going en masse off in another direction, as if in the charge of some piscean drill sergeant.

  Of late the reef has been grossly overfished, but safeguards are now in force. The fish around the observatory are specially protected, but midnight poachers have been in among them. Coral, in all its colours and forms, furnishes the cellar of the ocean. It waves, red and straggling like a punk rocker’s hair, or sits in the form of a crown upon a rock, or looks large and a rather ghastly grey, like Einstein’s brain. The crown of thorns starfish has been gnawing at the coral along the Barrier Reef. The starfish live on the coral killing it and causing the conservationists a serious problem.

  These submarine wonders can be viewed from Hook Island in a trio of glass-bottomed boats, reassuringly called Titanic, Poseidon and Jaws.

  On the return voyage across the passage we called briefly at South Molle where parrots fly about like sparrows. The island boat was undergoing her annual overhaul and had been pulled from the water and lifted onto a cradle for the repairs. I sat happily doing that most felicitous thing, watching others work, before going back to the Telford Wanderer.

  Evening light on the water of the Whitsunday Passage; drifting seabirds, the sky wide and pale. On our starboard the hideous Happy Hooker made her technicoloured return to Shute Harbour. I could hear them singing raucously across the poetic water. Well, I suppose they had enjoyed their day, just as I had.

  QUEENSLAND ISLANDS Whitsunday Group situated latitude 20°30’S and longitude 149°E; area 12 sq. m (31 sq. km); resort islands; Dunk Island situated latitude 18°S and longitude 146°E; area 6 sq. m (16 sq. km); resort island; Australia

  Lord Howe Island

  Betwixt and Between

  Oh! What a snug little island A right little, tight little Island

  THOMAS DIBDEN

  After my years of fascination with islands, my journeys to them, my writing and my speaking of them, I am often asked: ‘Of all these small places which is your favourite?’

  My answer is always: Lord Howe Island.

  It lies between Australia and New Zealand, the most southerly coral island in the world, and one of the most spectacular. You can see it from miles away rising over the Tasman Sea. The warm air of the Pacific meets the cold currents drifting up from Antarctica at the summits of its twin mountains, Mt Gower and Mt Lidgbird. Clouds form while you wait.

  It is a rare place, rare in many senses. Much of its natural life is unique and jealously guarded; it is the home of the golden whistler and the sacred kingfisher. Also rare is the sense of old-fashionedness, in the steady pace of life, in the good manners and the gentle humour of its 270 inhabitants. They tell a story of the not-so-long-ago – when to reach Sydney meant a long journey by flying boat – of a boy who had never before left Lord Howe. Almost the first thing he saw when the plane splashed down at Rose Bay was a Sydney Corporation bus. ‘Look,’ he cried excitedly to his father, ‘a bus!’ He had never before seen one. Another Corporation bus came in view. He looked puzzled. But then, ‘Here it comes again!’ he shouted.

  Lord Howe is a cool island; cool in the sense that it has none of the over-ripeness of the Pacific, none of the lassitude of the Caribbean. Tropic, crystalline seas surround it and there is fine summer sun, but the trees that hold the eye are the spread and sturdy Norfolk pines, not palms; the close fields could be in England. Only the two pinnacled peaks speak of a more exotic place.

  The journey is not by flying boat now, although the islanders loved the bulbous Sunderlands left over from the war which they used until 1974. Before these came into service, the voyage to the mainland by sea took anything up to five, sometimes stormy, days.

  Now the 780 kilometre journey from Sydney is accompli
shed in two hours in a Dash-Eight, short-landing-and-take-off aircraft which houses thirty-six passengers. There was only one stretch of flat land in the island suitable for an airstrip, and Australian army engineers built it in eight months. It is like a gulley, not an easy landing because of constantly veering winds. There are three wind-socks, and pilots wryly joke that on some days they can be outstretched in three different directions.

  But the expedition to this lone and small island (it is four miles by one) is worth making. From the moment of arrival there comes an immediate sense of well-being. Someone arrives in a jeep to pick you up, and you ride through one of the world’s most enjoyable island landscapes. If there is one drawback it is that the twin peaks, Gower and Lidgbird, present a sight of such power and beauty that the eye is drawn to them again and again, from every angle, doing an injustice to the rest of the island scene, its beaches, coves and out-isles. When these peaks are out of view, you find yourself looking for them, waiting for their appearance, turning the next bend, climbing the next hill, sailing around the next headland, until you see them. They are constantly transforming, changing colour and form, green one moment, blue in another, grey at morning, smouldering red as the sun drops, wreathed in mist or with puffy white clouds touching their summits, a never-closing show.

  And yet Gower and Lidgbird were not the first features that the eighteenth-century navigators spied, the beacons that drew them to Lord Howe. Out in the Tasman Sea, nineteen kilometres away, is a great stack called Ball’s Pyramid, set on the horizon like a misty Camelot Castle. Its towers of rock taper to 552 metres and it is all but unapproachable. A naval survey party was working around it when I was on Lord Howe, and I inquired if they would be landing. ‘Not if we can help it,’ said one member laconically. ‘You have to swim. And there’s plenty of munchies out there.’