|
FRASER ISLAND, Queensland, Australia - Does that wolfish predator have its cold green eyes on my lunch? Or is it me as lunch - preferable to the ham sandwich in my hand?
As we eye each other warily, and I consider the beast's dietary wishes, the confrontation ends with Jeremy Durbin stomping the ground and clapping his hands. The tawny beast, a wild dog found only in Australia and known as a dingo, scoots off into the bush without placing a luncheon order.
Durbin, a personable young naturalist in the employ of the Kingfisher Bay Resort, has been showing us around the world's largest sandpile at sea, a.k.a. Fraser Island, a boot-shaped World Heritage Area stretching for 77 miles along the northeast Australian coast.
"Dingoes," he says, "are all over this place, and are used to humans. I don't think you're in any danger from them as long as you realize they're wild. Not to be fed or treated like a pet. They can be harmful if they feel cornered. Dingo attacks are uncommon - but they do happen."
He sees no future for me in a movie called "Dances With Dingoes."
Remember the Ancient Mariner's lament: "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink"? On Fraser it's sand, sand everywhere and not a putt to sink. It's just one big bunker sprinkled with water hazards, but no golf course. Now, or ever, even though the Kingfisher Resort is a first-rate establishment for those who want to get away from everything - everything except the comforts of a fine hotel.
Though possibly sandier than the Sahara, this is no desert isle despite so many deserted areas that can be reached only on foot, boat or aboard 4-wheel driving machines. Nothing barren about it because rain forests and fresh-water lakes are everywhere. For generations the island was controlled by sand mining and lumbering firms. But by 1976 they had been expelled by conservationists, winners of a 25-year battle led by John Sinclair to turn the island back to nature.
Well, almost. But the Kingfisher Resort is tucked into the environment so neatly that you could easily miss the airy hotel lobby and restaurants as well as villas, and the guest rooms off open, elevated walkways. The landscape does provide a wonderful coverup. Michael Coe, the manager, wants it known that his inn has "a wide range of accommodations, luxurious to economy. We don't want to shut anybody out of this island experience."
The humblest pocketbooked (or get-closest-to-nature types) may opt for camping, and the island has plenty of good locations for sleeping-baggers and tenters.
Jouncing in a skidding, groaning 4-wheel driven by Jeremy Durbin, we cruise the territory on abandoned, barely navigable logging trails, rutted and sometimes corduroyed - otherwise impassable - with boards and logs as in the American Midwest of the 18th century. Here the trunks of towering gums are tattooed with the fascinating zig-zag graffiti of the scribbly gum moth. Artistic insects?
"Well, yes," says Jeremy. "Incidentally, I suppose. Despite the aesthetic patterns they leave, what they're really doing is searching for march flies that they dissect to steal the nectar the flies have collected."
Over there a gigantic sandblow, a sort of gritty glacier, has moved unimpeded, at the whims of the winds, to overpower and bury a couple of miles of forest. Protruding, the topmost branches seem television antennae that could illustrate Newton Minow's long-ago - yet still apt - characterization of TV as "a vast wasteland."
"Sandblows aren't speedy," Jeremy says. "They move one to three meters a year. But unstoppably."
Pulling out of the woods and across serious dunes, he steers onto a long, empty, and inviting beach where tiers of surf pile in, bashing a 1935 shipwreck, the gutted, once-proud 410-foot luxury liner Maheno. Swimming looks good. But isn't, says Durbin.
"Dangerous currents and numerous sharks. But don't despair. Have I got a swimming hole for you? You'll see."
"What would be nice," says friend Aurelio, "is seeing Fraser as a whole. An overview."
"Be patient," counsels Jeremy. "That's in store, too."
Friend Ron Sampson says, "I guess we'd need a plane."
"Patience, please," Jeremy repeats.
Within minutes a single-engine airplane materializes, perhaps a convenient mirage? No. Nick Braithwaite and his winged vehicle are real enough. Like some taxi driver in an unlikely section of town, Nick sits beside his Cessna 205, face upturned to scoop a batch of rays, waiting for business.
The fare, $35, is a bargain, revealing all at low altitude and speed. "What's the in-flight movie?" Sampson asks, clicking his seat belt. "Do we get frequent-flier miles?"
"This is better than a movie, but more a short-subject travelogue," says pilot Braithwaite.
Aurelio decides, "The island could be a golf course for titan-like gods. Look at those colored slopes [ ochre and silver sand called the Pinnacles] , the bunkery sandblows and stretches of trees, the streams, ponds, and lakes."
"What about fairways?" Sampson wonders.
"Gods don't need grass. They can walk on anything."
According to the Aborigines, once the only Fraserians, this is gods' country. Regardless of scientific, geological explanations for the formation of this Pacific sandbox, the Aboriginal legend is a better story.
In the beginning, as Beiral, the creator, was going about his business of forming the world, he sent his beautiful, beloved daughter, K'gari, and a helper, Yindingie, to earth to scout locations and make recommendations on where to place his creations.
K'gari was so taken with the planet that she wanted to stay. Beiral disapproved, but she wept and pleaded. Unwilling, but unable to deny her, he agreed, asking her what form she'd choose to be. While she was napping Yindigie decided she'd be perfect as an island. Thus Beiral transformed K'gari into this island, with trees to keep her warm, animals to keep her company, and lakes to be her eyes so that she could see her father in heaven.
"I'll remember K'gari's bright blue-gray eyes," Aurelio says as the plane alights on the firm beach landing strip.
"And," says Jeremy, "we'll soon be eye drops at Lake McKenzie as we go swimming. These spacious waterholes are called perched dune lakes, unique splashes. They're formed when peat, leaves, and mud bond together as almost impenetrable surfaces where water collects in saucerlike depressions between the dunes, and high above the water table."
Dropping into the purer-than-pure, clearer-than-clear, glistening fresh water of the broad McKenzie, mounted on its alabaster sand base, you feel baptismally dunked.
"Wash your sins away in the non-tide, friends," observes Sampson, who decides to keep his by disdaining the dip.
Refreshed, we're on the bounding road again, deeper into a rain forest that blots out all but slivers of sun. Up and down on gasping shock absorbers, along brooding, narrow corridors of green. Walled-in by huge ferns, closely-packed pine and palm, satinay, and eucalyptus (a.k.a. gum) trees, spaghetti-twisted vines, and the ominous strangler figs that seek to choke everything within reach, we are welcomed to claustrophobia.
Surely this is the forest primeval that has us in its clutches.
"Let's get out. I want to show you Wanggolback Creek," says Jeremy, leading the way through thickets, presently pointing into a dark, dank gully. "Who knows how far back this goes?"
The creek, amid rotting timber and new sprouts - a timeless cycle of death and rebirth - looks slimy at first. But the water is so lucid that what's showing is the sandy bottom. Populated by eels and crayfish called yabbies, and other fish, the stream is not only a shadowy, moist underworld but a fountainhead of surging life as satinay and gums shoot up almost 200 feet, straining for heaven.
Short quandong trees, horizontally-striped in blue, drop their scarlet leaves silently into the creek, but there are sound effects. Throaty cicadas, advertising for love, sizzle louder than high tension wires. White-breasted kookaburras flit about, guffawing again and again, seemingly equipped with endless laugh tracks.
Is the laugh on those of us who may not believe the story of the Beira and his daughter, and how this all came about?
Back at the Kingfisher's beach, soldier crabs have mobilized and are marching, regiment after regiment, into the dusk. If you get too close they disappear into the sand faster than you can say "foxhole."
They're shy, but not the dingoes. As we dine well on fresh local seafood, a dingo outside is crooning along with the singing piano player in the bar, both of them drowning out the night-warbling frogs. That dingo ought to learn Bobby Short's tune, "Sand in My Shoes," and get an agent.
|