Hayman Island by Nancy Lyon

It’s the eighth wonder of the world, visible by astronauts even from the moon. And here I am upside down in November in the land down under, paddling around in it happy as a duck.

I was half expecting great white Jaws and Jules Verne’s squids and giant gelatinous Men of War - a macho diver’s paradise with danger lurking around every bubble. But here I am in the Mother of all reefs, a work of art 25 million years in the making, playing footsies with some soft corals and gaudy sea anemones with my diving fin as sensitive as skin, and following “George,” a huge squat grouper with a pouting bulldog mug who thinks he’s a sheepdog, rounding up streams of teeny iridescent fish to be photographed.

Snorkeling in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is hallucinogenic. Shapes upon shapes in the luminous blue wet - long waving tendrils, giant brains, kidneys, spongy fingers, stag horns, mushrooms, daisies, organ pipes, and translucent lacey sea fans — shot with flitting fireworks of oranges, greens, reds, fuchsias, and blues so mesmerizing you forget to breathe.

To think it’s the largest living thing on the planet. It stretches for 2,500 km, forming a labyrinthine barrier between Australia’s tropical northeast coast and the deep South Pacific Ocean, from the Torres Strait (between the northern tip of Australia and Western Papua New Guinea) to just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, off the coast of Gladstone. This fragile 344,000 sq km marine park, declared a World Heritage Site in 1981, is studded with over 600 islands, islets, atolls, shoals, and coral cays teeming with 15,000 species of marine life — including 1,500 varieties of fish and 400 types of soft and hard corals. Administered by the Great Barrier Reef Park Authority, it is classified into zones for preservation, scientific research, marine national park and recreational and commercial use.

From the air you can see that the reef is not continuous. It’s really a swirl of 3,000 individual patch reefs, ribbon reefs and fringing reefs of colorful live corals built over mountains and milleniums of dead corals — the calcium carbonate skeletons of zillions of marine polyps.

I had a DeHaviland Beaver’s eye view of it all the day before. I’d flown out from Hayman Island, the most northerly of the 74 Whitsunday Islands named by Captain James Cook as he sailed his Endeavor through the passage on Whit Sunday of June 1770. The paradise of pure silica-white-crystal beaches and swirling sand shoals, luminous blue water and eucalypt forests that Cook discovered, exists to this day, because most of the Whitsundays are inhabited and preserved as national parks.

You can’t get any closer to the outer reef than Hayman Island. This 960-acre hilly isle surrounded by fringing reef and covered with “bush” - native forests of eucalypts, cycads and hoop pine - is only a 15 minute boat ride from the outer reefs. When you’re staying at Hayman, one of the world’s most lavish five-star resorts - (priceless antiques, Italian white leather, lacquered Japanese tea tables, handmade pigskin chairs, fruitwood armoires, hand-woven durra grasses, 60 chefs, 10 restaurants and a 20,000 bottle wine cellar) - the 7,500 coral acres of Hardy Reef seem like your personal paradise.

As we flew out over the calm tourmaline of the Whitsunday Passage, Coral Air pilot Peter Bull from Airlie Beach pointed out some attractions below -giant loggerheads arranged like stepping stones in the deep, and Heart Reef, meticulously shaped like a valentine. With visibility clear to a depth of 200 feet, the turtles and the reef seemed to float on the surface.

After a 25-minute spin, Peter Bull’s refurbished seaplane, built in Toronto in 1960, splashed down to rendezvous with Peter’s waiting semi-submersible. From this mini-semi-submarine, my travelling companions and I gaped at the marine show through the underwater windows, then hopped overboard with disposable underwater cameras strapped to our wrists.

Click! it’s a giant clam! Click! it’s a giant sea cucumber! I was happy to be swimming in the reef because the afternoon before, the beach of Hayman’s Lagoon Bay had been wall-to-wall with mama, papa and baby sting rays half-submerged in the sand, their long tails ending in filaments as fine as wires. When I waded in they flapped their eerie cloaks and glided off in clouds of sand, and I wasn’t inspired to join them. Instead, I lapped around the gigantic saltwater pool — seven times Olympic size — that surrounds Hayman’s tiered West Wing guestrooms, marbled suites and opulent penthouses like a royal moat.

With its proximity to the reef, and its own PADI 5-star dive centre, Hayman attracts serious divers and passionate snorkelers. But one can stay under water just so long. As for other ways to get wet, there’s water-skiing, windsurfing, sailing and parasailing, three pools with more than enough water for everyone, and in the state-of-the-art fitness centre, a flotation tank and icy plunge pool. As for staying dry, there’s the usual tennis, squash, 18-hole putting green. But to feel yourself really landed in Australia -after exploring the resort’s 30 acres of magnificent themed gardens (formal, informal, rain forest and Oriental) and admiring the flora and fauna portrayed in the resort’s collection of Australian oils and watercolors, and savoring chef Mark Andrew Patten’s Kangaroo enchiladas - a bushwalk over the island’s marked trails in the relative cool of a tropical morning is de rigueur. Trails wind along the ridge of 250-meter high Mt. Carousel to Cook’s Lookout for a panoramic view of the Whitsunday Passage.

Wedge tail eagles... orange-blue-green Rainbow Lorikeets... yellow plumed Cockatoos... laughing Kookaburras... blue Kingfishers... Boocook owls... Pied Currawongs... Blue Tiger butterflies and bright fuschia Cressidas. Hayman’s winged show consists of 20 species of native sea and land birds and nine varieties of butterflies, flitting through the silvery eucalypt, cycad, black wattle and blood wood trees. Agile, wild Saanen goats, introduced in the last century as food for shipwrecked sailors, scamper along the ridges and cliffs.

Hayman has known waves of visitors since aborigines came in dugout canoes thousands of years ago, but the first “tourists” didn’t come until 1933, when Monty Embury brought people over on his Great Barrier Reef Expeditions. Visitors brought their own “cutlery, linen, lamp and dish” and for £1 a day got to stay in a pretty white tent. In 1936 American Wild West novelist Zane Grey came to Hayman to film his movie “White Death” (the ancestor of “Jaws”) and in 1947 Reginald Ansett of Ansett Airlines bought the island to build a showy international resort.

There are islands, and there are islands. Browsing through some of Australia’s history in Hayman’s elegant old world library, I thought how fortunate I was to land on Hayman, rather than Pinchgut, wherever Pinchgut was... The “Convicts Rum Song” in the New Oxford Book of
Australian Poetry, sings...

Cut yer name across me backbone,
Stretch me skin across a drum,
Iron me up on Pinchgut Island
From to-day till Kingdom Come!