Meeting and eating the wildlife on Fraser Island

I climb down the steps at the end of the Kingfisher Bay Resort’s jetty and introduce myself to the schools of tropical fish hanging out there, listening out all the while, I must admit, for the Jaws theme music.

Dangerous animals are a popular topic here, because Fraser Island is a Kate Moss kind of place — stunning to look at, but with serious reputation issues. In 2001, a young boy on an early-morning stroll along the beach was killed by dingoes. And in November 2004, the parents of a three-month-old baby found a dingo near the cot in their hotel room.

Today, there are fences to keep the dogs out of the resort’s grounds, and notices everywhere advise people not to feed their children to the wildlife.

Communing with nature, preferably without getting eaten, is what Fraser is all about. It is a 75-mile-long sand dune, rising to 360ft above sea level in places, and is covered almost entirely in rainforest. More than 350 species of bird live here, as do pythons, dugongs (“sea cows”) and the prehistoric- looking ferns that starred in Walking with Dinosaurs. It is practically unpopulated outside of the two main resort hotels and a few camp sites. You can still see why the Aborigines called it K’gari, or paradise.

Even so, sub-paradise would probably be a more accurate description, because the island is also one of Australia’s favourite places for pretending to be Jeremy Clarkson. Any Queensland family with a car that bears the slightest resemblance to a 4WD heads over here on the ferry and spends at least one weekend a year getting bogged down in the island’s treacherous sandy tracks.

This may sound like a paradox — nature reserve and 4WDs — but an off-road vehicle really is the best way to see the island, and the Aus$30 (£13) vehicle-permits fund the park and keep loggers at bay. And anyway, Jeremy Clarkson wouldn’t be that happy here, as there are no metalled roads to make his tyres squeal.

I join one of the resort’s 4WD tours, led by Peter, a khaki-shorted ranger with a perma-smile, the kind of guy it is impossible to ruffle — except, that is, when he has to stop his vehicle to wait while yet another inexperienced, ill-equipped driver is hauled off the track to await help. After our third wait, he gets ticked off by his manager for using fruity language over the CB radio.

The vehicle that I’m sharing with eight other people — Aussies, Brits and Americans — is a bus with tyres chunky enough for a jumbo jet. Even so, Peter needs all his guile to steer us up and down the deeply pitted inclines. It’s like Jurassic Park with fewer tyrannosauruses and a lot more bumps. I strap myself in to avoid opening up a new sun roof with my skull.

But if the forest tracks are 4WD hell, then the eastern beach is heaven. Here, Peter jams his Crocodile Dundee boot on the accelerator and races along the firm sand. It’s the stuff that Toyota ads are made of.

I should add that we aren’t squashing families of sunbathers as we go. The beach is empty, and wide enough for a small plane to land on, which actually happens just ahead of us. It’s a case of stop me and fly one, as 4WDs pull up and people go for a quick air tour over the island.

We park on the beach alongside a dozen vehicles at a place called Eli Creek. When Captain Cook sailed past in 1770, he wrote that “this part of the coast is very barren”, but he was wrong. The sand acts as a sponge, and the island is literally brimming over with fresh water. Lakes and creeks spring up everywhere, most of them naturally filtered and as clear as Evian.

At Eli Creek, a wooden walkway allows visitors to go upstream for a hundred yards or so, then jump into the cool, shallow water and float back to the beach. Cruising along on an inner tube is one of those perfect pleasures, like hearing a baby giggle, that brings a smile of pure joy to your face.

It is while grinning my way downstream through the rainforest that I catch my first glimpse of native Aussie mammals. Sitting calmly in the water are two large, pinkish creatures that look like land-dwelling dugongs.

They are fine specimens, with large baseball caps and a beer bottle clutched in each hand. As I pass, I hear them uttering their characteristic cry of, “Ashes? Poms robbed us, mate.”

Our next stop, though, convinces me that we are the only humans left on the planet. Deep in the rainforest, we park above the diamond-clear waters of Lake McKenzie, which is ringed by the whitest sand beach I have ever seen in my life. We picnic on sandwiches and champagne, and I can’t resist the temptation to grab a glass of bubbly and the inner tube, and float off across the lake. The only thing lacking is a butler to swim out and replenish my glass, but my tour package doesn’t include that. I should have read the fine print.

Next day, I join a whale- and dolphin-watching trip. As we head north for an hour, parallel to an apparently infinite beach, we get an informative talk about the humpback whales, and the reasons why we won’t be going too close to them (so as not to disturb the newborn young).

We turn out into the bay and get instant gratification. A gigantic mother is slapping the sea with her black tail, while her “baby”, a 13ft bundle of energy, breaches again and again, lifting its white belly out of the water and flopping down on its back. You almost expect the father to come alongside the boat, handing out cards saying “birthday parties a speciality”.

On my last evening, I get ready to meet even more Australian wildlife, this time on a plate. When I heard that we were going to be eating “bush tucker”, I thought we’d be chewing on the kind of wiggly things that eat your furniture. But in the event, the food is insect-free. I try bush limes (like tiny green grapefruit), bush tomatoes (a kind of raisin flavoured with Bisto), and native pears that taste like fresh peas. If there’s “bush broccoli”, I expect it tastes of raspberries.

These misnomers are uncharacteristic of Australians, who are usually very blunt when naming things. They call an espresso coffee a “short black”, and Fraser’s spectacular Pacific shoreline is romantically named Seventy-Five Mile Beach.

The Aussies are going to have to find a less blunt name for one of the meaty items on our menu — the mahogany-red kangaroo steaks. According to the resort’s manager, a former chef, the drought across much of the outback is making it increasingly tough to raise cattle there, and people are thinking that it might be best to farm native species for meat. But judging by the lack of enthusiasm for roo steaks at our bush-tucker barbecue, they’ll need to camouflage its origin. Few of us want to chew on slices of a cuddly TV star like Skippy. It’d be like eating Barbara Windsor.

The resort grows its own bush-tucker plants and is generally very ecofriendly, the manager tells me during the barbecue. He even explains how they treat their sewage. I listen just long enough to make sure they don’t pour it over their bush tucker.

After dinner, I wander down to the beach through gardens thick with native bush plants and dotted with ponds. The birds that are so chatty during the day are silent now, and the only sound I hear is the singing of frogs. They seem to be chanting “Rooney, Rooney, Rooney.” In Australia, even the animals can’t stop talking about sport.

Stephen Clarke is the author of Merde Actually (Bantam Press £10.99)

Travel brief

Tour operators: Trailfinders (0845 054 7777, www.trailfinders.com) can tailor-make a 10-night package from £1,079pp, with three nights at the four-star Holiday Inn Brisbane and seven nights at Kingfisher Bay Resort (00 61 7 4120 3333, www.kingfisherbay.com), including flights from Heathrow to Brisbane with Japan Airlines (via Tokyo), and transfers from Brisbane to the resort. Or try Austravel (0870 166 2020, www.austravel.com), Travelbag (0870 814 6252, www.travelbag.co.uk), or Quest Travel (0870 442 3542, www.questtravel.co.uk).

Local packages: the Fraser Island Company (00 61-7 4125 3933, www.fraserislandco.com.au) operates a range of excursions from Hervey Bay, from £66pp for an all-inclusive day tour to a three-day camping adventure from £159pp. Or try Sand Island Safaris (7 4128 4119, www.sandislandsafaris.com.au), or Cool Dingo Tour (7 4120 3333, www.cooldingotour.com). Kingfisher Bay Resort offers a tour of the island for £53pp.

THE OTHER SIDE OF OZ
The wonders of Western Australia: www.timesonline.co.uk/australasia