Australasia > Australia > Queensland > Fraser Island > History > Articles > Tales from the Dead

Yankee Jack Pigott was found buried head first in the sand with his feet sticking out. He was as dead as a dodo.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this,” says ranger Alan Souter as we trudge up the massive Hammerstone Sandblow, one of Fraser Island’s fine white sand dunes. And so he continues. Jack, the island’s first commercial logger in the 1860s, was a big man with a flaming red beard who used to shoot the local Aborigines of the Butchulla tribe from the back of his horse. He’d also been ripping them off, underpaying those who worked under the whites for the island’s logging industry. There’s no place for such nastiness in K'gari, which translates as ‘Paradise’, thought the Butchulla men.

Looking out from the top of the sand dune, it’s easy to see why this Queensland island earned such a heavenly name amongst its first inhabitants. The pippies are plentiful, the beaches are wide, the days long and hot and fresh water runs from secretive streams and strong creeks through cool valleys sheltered by ancient trees: satinay, brushbox and kauri pine.

The hearts of these forests now line the Suez Canal and London’s dockyards, when they were rebuilt after WW2. There are still a few samples of the fine trees around the old loggers’ settlement, Central Station, where massive staghorns drip from their trunks and a posse of rose gums stands so impossibly straight, their ivory bark so smooth that they immediately make you want to take up tree hugging.

Fraser Island’s been a bit of a hot spot since the Butchulla people first discovered it, maybe 20,000 years ago. They relished the plentiful bounty of the island, amply demonstrated by the great mounds of empty seashells that crunch underfoot hundreds, even thousands of years later.

There are rumours of Portuguese explorers floating past in the 1500s, then in 1770, Captain James Cook cruised by, naming the prominent bump midway up on the island Indian Head, using the then-fashionable term in London circles for any non-European peoples.

Just like he managed to miss Sydney Harbour, Cook made a similar mistake in deciding there wouldn’t be any fresh water on the island, and kept on sailing past. In fact, Eli Creek pumps out an estimated 80 megalitres of water a day, while crystal-clear Lake McKenzie is a pool of pure rainwater.

Nine years later, the omnipresent Matthew Flinders stepped onto the island and hung out with one of the local Aboriginal tribes, which then started to include a few convict types, skipping out on the drudgery of slave labour.

The next celeb to drop in was Eliza Fraser, a wittering socialite headed back to Britain on the ship the Stirling Castle, captained by her husband James Fraser. Falling pregnant during the journey, the London It girl was reduced to giving birth in an open longboat surrounded by low-brow sailors after her husband’s dodgy navigation saw the ship run aground on Queensland’s reefs.

The longboat was washed up on the island, all the men died, and Eliza went from sipping tea in the best drawing rooms to being nursed by local Aborigines for nine months before she was rescued, yet again, this time by a search party from Morton Bay.

An enterprising lass, Eliza found herself yet another sea captain husband headed for London, where she sold her story of shipwreck and deprivation for 5p a telling before dying in a British mental institution. We’re not sure her publicity-seeking soul would be assuaged at the thought of tubby Noel Ferrier playing her husband in the 1976 movie Eliza Fraser, although she should be mollified in the island also being her namesake.

The most obvious of yet more disastrous endings on the island is the wreck Maheno. When she was built in 1905, the Maheno was the fastest ship on the high seas. Nothing could outrun her, so she was pressed into service as an unescorted hospital ship in the First World War, before being run aground en route to Japan for scrap metal during a cyclone in 1935.

Despite its years of service, the poor shell was reduced even further by an elite squad of crack Aussie troops, the mysterious Z Force who attended a top-secret commando school on the island during WWII. The men used her as target practice, blasting away the funnels and masts, a skill they’d employ during the war with stunning results.

Now, the wreck is quietly rusting on 75 Mile Beach, and the troop carriers are not full of soldiers, but backpackers, box wine and two-minute noodles. They pull up for a snapshot and a game of cricket on the firm sand, and to listen to the rangers’ stories of the island, which are as vivid as the coloured sand dunes that form their backdrop.

Trip notes
Getting there: Air Fraser Island flies from Hervey Bay and Sunshine Coast airports to Fraser Island. There are also catamarans and vehicle barges departing from River Heads, Urangan and Inskip Point.

Tours: You can book a ranger-guided tours including canoeing, birdwatching and Butchulla walks through Kingfisher Bay Resort or take a one or two-day tour with Fraser Explorer Tours, www.fraserexplorertours.com.au

Where to stay: Kingfisher Bay Resort has a range of accommodation options including hotel-style rooms, beach shacks and full-blown designer family villas. www.kingfisherbay.com

IMAGES
http://media.kingfisherbay.com
www.livinggallery.com.au Great images by Kingfisher Bay ranger Peter Meyer. PR: Kaye Bishop, Kingfisher Bay Resort

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