The Book Tower
debut novel coming soon

To recap, the Australian adventure started in Sydney, followed by a detour to Cairns and a flight out to Dunk Island. Returning to Cairns, an hour’s bus ride to Port Douglas, then a short diversion to the Great Barrier Reef and Cape Tribulation. Cairns to Brisbane, and from there to Fraser Island.

Here’s a view of Brisbane taken from something they have that’s similar to London’s Millenium Wheel. In fact this part of Brisbane has many similarities to London, with its own South Bank, although there are some idiosyncratic riverside attractions including a man made beach. What spoils Brisbane is the cavalier approach to motorways and bridge building; you can see from the photograph the busy highway running along the opposite side of the river, a nightmare during a rush hour that never ceases.

Brisbane’s tourist attractions include water parks (looking very empty as we drove past – although remember that the kids are at school in Australia throughout August) and Movie World. This is a theme park similar to California’s Universal Studios, although much smaller and in this case masterminded by Warner Brothers. Like Universal Studios, Movie World tends to cling on to attractions celebrating long forgotten or unpopular films. In California I remember being treated to the Backdraft experience (a terrible film about firemen with Robert de Niro) and the Back to the Future Ride (more than a decade after the film’s release). While Warner Brothers are safe in their investment of Batman and Superman, there’s more of a blindingly obvious problem with the Wild West ride (dismal Will Smith vehicle from a decade ago).

My enjoyment of Movie World was dimmed by tiredness and the amount of Japanese visitors with their camcorders (I caught one of them enthusiastically filming the menu in the Bat Burger Bar). I was a little more geared up for the Australian Experience. This is an extravaganza where guests are compelled to wear straw stetsons and sit in either “red” or “yellow” opposing teams to cheer, whoop and do Mexican waves. Oddly, the majority of team members appeared to be locals. There is a photo of me, which I won’t share, where I resemble an extra from Deliverance.

The drive to take the ferry to Fraser Island is five hours from Brisbane. It’s worth it to see this extraordinary place, a rain forest on an island completely made up of sand. The three day visit was quite intense, including a full day tour of the island (it’s huge) and a morning spent whale watching (another activity spoilt by trigger happy camcorder users – it’s amazing that no small children were nudged off the boat in the making of their home movies).

Island tours are by four wheel drive, the only possible means of transport around Fraser Island. Our driver and guide was a highly informative Australian called Alan, doing the job for many years and a presence I imagine has always been on the island (on returning I was chatting to a colleague who’d visited several years ago. He asked “did you get Alan?” Fact). Unlike the majority of holiday tours, this one was interesting, amusing and I learnt a great deal. And despite the rather rocky rhythm of the tour bus (giving the more violent rides at Movie World a run for their money) I did not succumb to motion sickness.

Like mainland Australia, Fraser Island has gone a little crazy in Dingo awareness. I have a soft spot for the dingo, although alas I did not spot any outside of a zoo. There are warnings not to feed or encourage them (hey dingo, fancy a barbecue?), although they are quite scarce on Fraser. The history of this creature is quite fascinating. More wolf than dog (they howl but cannot bark – although the less pure variety are dog/dingo hybrids), they were originally brought to Australia thousands of years ago by migrant fisherman. The idea was to provide an easy supply of ready food should the fishing go belly up. The Aboriginals semi-domesticated the animals, using them to hunt, and were responsible for bringing them to Fraser Island. But the dominance of the white man brought trouble; dingos became reliant on man, feeding from rubbish tips, being fed, becoming scavengers, eventually becoming aggressive when the supplies of food were not forthcoming. In recent decades Fraser Island has attempted to rehabilitate the dingo, removing the opportunity for them to scavenge and slowly allowing them to become natural hunters again. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be an Australian-wide policy, and the animals continue to be a danger to the modern man that changed their behaviour in the first place.

The Aussie adventure ended with a brief return to Brisbane before flying back to Blighty. The returning jetlag is a killer, I have only just recovered, but it was still worth it. And it’s really only half a world away…

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