All natural ... South Stradbroke Island, with Couran Cove Island Resort in the foreground.
From the clamour of the Gold Coast, Susan Johnson escapes to the splendid isolation of South Stradbroke Island.
What is it about places that can be reached only by boat? When you are going somewhere on water, everything chasing you falls behind: jobs, bills, worries, appointments and people you don't especially want to see. Boats untie you and the places they reach possess an unbreachable stillness.
Islands without cars, accessible only by private boat, water taxi or ferry, seem especially apart. There is nothing like arriving by boat at a beach house with its own private jetty (even if the boat is a jumped-up dinghy that goes by the name "Bugger") to make you forget everything that ails you.
South Stradbroke Island, a sand island that lies off the northern reaches of Queensland's clamorous Gold Coast, is only 500 metres from the mainland. Yet its prehistoric forests, unpeopled beaches, grazing wallabies, no-car policy and freshwater marshlands are a different world from the Gold Coast hubbub.
First noted in European history on Captain Cook's chart of 1770, the island was once joined to its more famous neighbour, North Stradbroke (or "Straddie" as it is known to locals). Queensland's famously freakish weather separated north from south some time in the 1890s when several violent storms started to cut the island in two.
The passage between them, known as Jumpinpin, was further enhanced in 1894 by the ship Cambus Wallace, wrecked in yet another storm with its cargo of whisky and dynamite. As a safety precaution, the washed-up dynamite was later exploded, the sound echoing for miles, leaving great gouges where it blew. Local oyster farmers are believed to have made short shrift of the whisky.
Today, amid the island's ancient stillness, there remains a satisfying sense of menace. The weather might do anything: storms, cyclones, or else a sun so fierce it bashes you around the head like a club.
The surf thundering onto the 30 kilometres of white beaches is not shark-netted and there is always the faint, thrilling chance of being mauled. There are snakes and spiders and vast swaths of bush inhabited by all manner of biting, stinging creatures.
As we cycle through one of the island's resorts one afternoon, a python capable of eating a small wallaby slides across our path. It's at least two metres long. As well as snakes there are geckos, bandicoots, sugar gliders, blue-tongued lizards and birds we have never seen before. I spy a beautiful flashing blue bird as big as a crow, which resembles a surreal, giant budgie.
We're lucky enough to rent a house at mates rates on one of the new island canal estates. I must admit that when I heard the house was on a canal estate, I pictured one of those Gold Coast jobs, with Versace overkill and Doric columns.
In fact, most of the houses on the modest two or three canals near the cove at the centre of the island are more tastefully Bali-influenced. Our house is architect-designed, airy and open to the elements. It has a tin roof on which the tropical rain makes an agreeable din.
It's a treat, walking barefoot to the bottom of the garden and to the fine white sand at the water's edge. My inner-city-bred teenage sons love jumping into a kayak and pushing off, though they learn a hard lesson about tides when the kayaks they dragged high up the beach in the afternoon are washed away by morning.
At night, the only sounds are the lapping of water and the cries of wild, unknown animals. Occasionally, there's the sound of music or laughter from one of the houses across the water, which are mostly used as weekenders. Some are available for rent.
The only other places to stay on the island are at a camping ground, at one of two resorts or - possibly best of all - in one of the original old beach houses in what passes for the island's only village, Currigee.
Once the camp of fishermen, oyster men and their families, Currigee remained remote from the mainland until the 1950s. Before telephones appeared on the island, a mirror on the mainland was used to alert islanders to phone messages. They would go by boat to fetch them.
The lovely old-fashioned houses of Currigee are mostly owned by wealthy, old Brisbane families and passed down from generation to generation. Scattered among them are a few architect-designed johnny-come-lately dwellings of wood, steel and glass, owned by the sort of folk who understand the distinction between a grissino from Turin and an altamura from Puglia. It is usually these new houses that are available to rent.
Of course, some who visit South Stradbroke don't stay at all: they come in great hordes on a day cruise from the Gold Coast to spend the day drinking at the older of the island's two resorts. These are mostly the sort of folk who sport large tattoos, though, confusingly, folk who know about grissino from Turin are these days just as likely to favour large tattoos, too.
South Stradbroke is 20-odd kilometres long and only 2½ kilometres at its widest point. Its luxuriant vegetation (depleted over the years by timber cutting and sand mining, which have now ceased) is due to an abundant water supply held in a water table floating on the ebb and flow of the tide.
While North Stradbroke had its own poet, the late Kath Walker (later Oodjeroo Noonuccal), who turned the island into an emblem of Aboriginal displacement and reclamation, South Stradbroke has only the poetry of its sand and trees.
Yet these things have in turn inspired poetry in the souls of ordinary men. In an 1886 article in the now defunct Logan Witness, an old timberman recorded his memories of cutting cypress pine (once common on the island but now almost extinct): "As I turned homewards, I cast my face on the short expanse of water between Deepwater Point and Stradbroke Island and remembered when, 22 years ago, I helped Jesse Baker and some others to paddle a team of bullocks over to draw cypress pine ..."
South Stradbroke remains a beautiful place to cast your face over expanses of racing ocean or tangled forests, over a mob of grazing wallabies or a flashing blue bird resembling a giant budgie. I've met Parisians who would kill to put their European toes into unbroken white sand like South Stradbroke's.
The island's largest development, Couran Cove Island Resort, styles itself as an eco-resort. It has a revegetation program, low carbon emissions, solar hot water and bush cabins scattered among ghost and lemon gums. Many are privately owned and available to rent.
Named after Australian artists (even Joy Hester finally gets her own place), the cabins resemble old-fashioned beach houses. They have fly-screened verandahs, bicycle racks out the front and it's only a short walk through the bush to the beautiful beach, which the weather sometimes ruins for safe swimming.
But the thing about South Stradbroke and its only patrolled beach, watched over by a single lifeguard responsible for putting out the red flags that indicate danger, is that it is the perfect spot for considered risk-taking. Swimming in a non-shark-netted ocean, on an empty beach blown out by the wind, is freedom at its most joyous.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Jetstar and Virgin Blue fly non-stop to the Gold Coast from Sydney (80min, from $89 one way) and Melbourne (2hr); Tiger Airways flies from Melbourne only (from $60 one way).
Couran Cove Island Resort runs a 40-minute ferry to South Stradbroke Island for guests and non-guests from a departure terminal at Hope Harbour, 45 minutes' drive from Gold Coast Airport and an hour from Brisbane Airport. The ferry costs $50 adults, $25 children. Zane's Water Taxis costs $80 one way for up to six adults, 0404 905 970. Or Broadwater Taxi 0403 587 804.
Staying there
Couran Cove Island Resort has rooms from $265, two-bedroom lodges from $495 and four-bedroom villas. There are plenty of amenities, including a kids' club, sports centre, gyms, eco-tours, pools and bicycles. Phone 1800 268 726, see couran.com.
There are four camping grounds on the island, administered by Gold Coast City Council. Unpowered sites cost from $17 a night and huts and cabins from $56. Phone 1800 444 474, see goldcoasttouristparks.com.au/park/stradbroke-island.
Online holiday-rental sites include holidayrentals.com.au and takeabreak.com.au.
There are few dining options: The Restaurant at Couran Cove Island Resort for seafood, pasta and steak; the cheap and cheerful bar and restaurant at Couran Point Beach Resort, currently only open at weekends. BYO provisions; there's a shop at Couran Cove Island Resort and in high season a boat services the camping grounds but provisions are expensive.
Reading
South Stradbroke Island, by Lindy Salter (Walter Ferguson & Company, 2002).
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