OMG, I am in total amazement overload! I take back anything
I said about exaggerated claims on Fraser Island, which is absolutely mesmerizing.
But let me start from the very beginning: I was picked up at Ingenia Holidays
at about 7:45 am, in an Isuzu truck that had been rigged as an all-terrain
vehicle for carrying about 16 people (when I was in Mongolia with Zoe I
remember thinking that Isuzu trucks would be particularly well suited for such
a task, and I am glad to say I was right). As it is, I got to ride shotgun, so
all day I enjoyed the big front window.
After getting our group together we went to the ferry
terminal, got on the ferry, and proceeded to see a school of dolphins coming
out of the estuary and coming into the bay. The “bay” is really the lagoon
formed between the mainland and the sand bar, and was first charted by my hero,
James Cook, in 1770 (he actually thought it was a peninsula rather than an
island). In the early 1800’s Scottish Captain Fraser shipwrecked on the seaward
side of the island, together with his wife Eliza and the crew. The castaways
were received by the friendly aborigines, and Captain Fraser had the unfortunate
notion that he and the crew would travel to Brisbane to seek help, while Eliza
Fraser remained in the island under the protection of the aborigines (transportation
had brought the dregs of the British prisons to the penal ports of Sydney and
Brisbane). Unfortunately for them, the aborigines along their path were not
friendly, and the whole party got massacred. Luck had it that a convict managed
to escape from the penal colony and worked his way north to the island, where
Eliza Fraser convinced him to guide her to Brisbane, in what was a long trip
full of wild adventures. Destitute as she arrived in Brisbane, she started
telling her amazing stories about her adventures, made enough money to go back
to Scotland, and spent the rest of her life milking her sensationalist tales
(half of which were make believe). It is after Eliza that Fraser Island got its
name.
The island is very different than say Padre Island, in that
it is quite rugged, with the highest peak rising 250 m above sea level. It
forms part of a littoral cell that starts in the rivers that reach the coast
south of Brisbane, and is the fourth or fifth of a series of barrier islands
that were formed by beach drift to the north. The northern end of Fraser is the
end of the cell, after which sand cascades down into the deep sea floor. The
Great Barrier Reef officially starts north of Fraser, because reefs cannot
thrive where there is a high amount of sediment in the water. The highlands are
formed by indurated sand dunes, so in this case it is pretty clear that the
ultimate origin of the island was by accumulation of generations of coastal dunes
against some small basaltic hills during the Ice Age, when sea level was much
lower than it is today. As sea level rose the sand dunes were isolated as an
island, and the lowland behind them became the Sand Strait or Hervey Bay.
So the whole thing is formed by fine sand. Our vehicle was
perfectly suited for this terrain, but any 2-wheel drive truck would have been
hopelessly mired in the soft sand. We first crossed the island and came to the
east coast, facing the Pacific, where we ran at 80 km per hour in the shallow
water, along what Cook named the 75-mile beach. This is where we saw a dingo!
This is the true, genetically pure, Australian wild dog. It somehow managed to
get to the island 3,000 years ago, and from here it radiated into the
Australian subcontinent, where it has now bred with all sorts of domestic dogs.
But here, where there are no dogs, it remains genetically pure. Interestingly,
they know it arrived about 3,000 years ago, because after that date it became a
dominant motif in pictographic representations. They are wild and can be quite
dangerous to kids and small adults, although on the surface they look like a
skinny dog. They have been known to drown kangaroos by crowding on them along
the beach; the kangaroo, which happens to be a good swimmer, goes in the water
to get away from the dogs, but every time he tries to come back to the beach
they attack, eventually the kangaroo gets tired, drowns, and gets eaten by the
dingos (apparently a woman almost died the same way, but in the last minute was
rescued by some fishermen).
Water is fascinating in the island, from the many springs
formed as groundwater intersects the topography, to the perched dune crystalline
lakes, which are fed exclusively by rainfall, and can go dry in times of
drought (mean annual precipitation here is about 48 inches). The weird thing is
that the lakes are in what looks like totally permeable sand, held perched only
by the decaying vegetation that permeated through the sand. I forgot to mention
that the island is covered by a luxuriant sub-tropical rainforest, with
100-foot trees and spiders with bodies the size of peanuts (plus platypus,
equidnas, and kangaroos). So the question is, what do these tress feed on in an
island formed by quartz sand? Minor vegetation apparently relies on fungi that
grows between the sand grains, but the big trees rely on humic matter that has
oozed down the sand grains to depths as great as 10 m. These sands are called coffee
rocks, because they look like they have been permeated in thick coffee. In a
million years the humic substances could very well crack into natural gas!
The springs are true oasis of luxuriant ferns, palms, and
epiphytes. They are the closest I have ever seen to a Carboniferous landscape, including
living fossils of Angiopteris evecta, a fern known from the Carboniferous.
I have so much more to tell you, but I am getting hungry and
probably should stop here. I saw another
school of dolphins on the ferry trip back, and as we were driving back to town
in the dusk we saw thousands of flying foxes (some truly enormous fruit-eating
bats) leaving their roosts in the trees of the mainland to fly across the Sandy
Strait and spend the night foraging in Fraser Island. What a day!
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