Hamburgers In Paradise
The Age
Saturday February 4, 1995
Anne Chisholm is happy to find that paradise still has a sting on Dunk Island, Queensland's most sturdy island resort.
FOR MOST of us, the fantasy of escape to an island in the sun retains a deep, indestructible power. Just off the plane from a dank London winter, struggling to adjust to a sticky Melbourne, the prospect of being transported for the weekend to a tropical island in Queensland not far from the Great Barrier Reef was intoxicating.
Visions of turquoise seas, pale sand and palm trees hovered in my head; they might be cliches but they were potent cliches. Warning of lethal stingers passed me by; when I was told that on island resorts all the drinks come with little colored umbrellas in them, I did not care. I wanted soothing unreality, and the threat of a few jellyfish and overenthusiastic bar staff was not going to put me off.
The fact that Dunk Island is a resort managed by Qantas and that you therefore have little choice but to get there as part of a Qantas package did make me wonder whether there was going to be too much togetherness for our taste. My idea of holiday hell remains anything resembling a week I spent once at a Club Med on the Malaysian coast: wire gates clanged behind you as you arrived, all locals apart from servants were excluded, the place was run like the court of a megalomaniac French tribal chief, and whenever I sat down with a book someone would appear to tell me I was missing volleyball in the pool.
Dunk Island, however, is a real place; by this I mean that it has a history that precedes its current listing in the instant paradise directory. In the two days before we boarded the plane, Dunk began to move towards a more substantial reality. My friend Lyn told me to find out whether the artist Bruce Arthur still had a workshop there; her late husband, the painter Fred Williams, had designed a tapestry for him. I was advised to investigate E. J. Banfield, the newspaperman who found the pressure of working for the Townsville Daily Bulletin at the turn of the century unbearable, built a house on Dunk Island for himself and his wife, Bertha, in 1902 and lived happily there for 25 years. If you leave Melbourne on an early morning flight, you can be on Dunk in time for lunch. From Townsville or Cairns, you pick up a small plane that is a treat in itself, zooming out across the edge of the continent, over the scattered humps of the offshore islands, to land on the airstrip where you find an awning and a smiling person handing you a glass of fresh fruit cup.
The 148-room ``plantation-style" resort is well hidden among trees and flowers. It is spread along a sweep of curving beach and back into a garden merging into the rainforest. Our apartment was in one of six Bayview villas, each with four large, split-level rooms, built a couple of years ago along the sand. Dazed with heat and light and flying, we stumbled into a cool blue-and-white space with propellor fans and sliding doors on to a long balcony looking through palm fronds to a silvery sea. For three days, only a handful of people and the occasional waterskiier appeared down our end of the beach.
If you are more sociable or energetic, or have children with you, there is no shortage of things to do. There are free activities (sailboarding, archery, aerobics) and a children's club that offers an overnight camp on the working farm in the middle of the island.
This costs extra, as does anything requiring skilled supervision, fuel or nerves of steel such as tandem sky diving or parasailing.
One disappointment was the difficulty and expense of getting out to the Great Barrier Reef itself. Beaver Cay is only 45 minutes away, but the trip takes from 11am until 4pm, includes lunch whether you want it or not, and costs $105. I was all set to do it, nevertheless, but the trip was abruptly cancelled and the only alternative for me was a private charter that cost $1000. I was told that because insurance and equipment costs make it uneconomic for the resort to run its own boats, reef trips are contracted out to mainland operators. But with the number of overseas visitors increasing steadily (52 per cent came from Europe last year), most of them drawn by the reef, it would surely be sensible to make the reef the centre of Dunk life rather than an expensive extra.
As with all the world's beautiful, fragile places, developers and visitors around the Great Barrier Reef must consider how to enjoy it without wrecking it. Dunk Island is bigger and sturdier than most of the islands, it has plenty of water and a long history of human habitation. By the time Banfield arrived, the 400 or so Aboriginal people who used to live there had been reduced to four. Banfield made friends with one of them, Tome, who showed him the island's treasures the best springs, where the best oysters grew; where to build his house.
Banfield became a fierce conservationist, declared Dunk Island a bird sanctuary, bullied the authorities into supporting him and always hoped that the island would become a fully protected national park; today, 75 per cent of it is run by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. The resort itself takes 350 guests and employs 175 staff.
Sewage is treated and recycled into the gardens; garbage is still buried in a large and unappealing landfill site. Once this is full, all garbage will be shipped off the island.
OF AN evening, there is entertainment of an unthreatening kind; pianists, a band and large servings of agreeable, if undistinguished, food. One night a week cane-toad racing takes place in the bar, but is easily avoided, as are the special cocktails in unusual colors with the umbrellas.
I recommend the twice-weekly night walk. Three of us, armed with torches, followed the knowledgable and enthusiastic Roger through the damp darkness, observing sleeping birds, glittering spiders' webs, a baby python climbing a tree towards the starlings' nests and a burrowing echidna. We walked through mangroves out on to the beach and stood in the starlight under a huge tree which, according to Roger, was at least 400 years old when Captain Cook sailed by and named Dunk to honor a connection of his patron Lord Hinchingbrooke.
The artist Bruce Arthur is still around, living in the hills about an hour's walk from the resort. Twice a week he receives visitors (for a small charge), shows them the weaving and ceramics and tells stories about his life. Fred Williams's tapestry is now in the gallery in Brisbane. Williams visited Dunk in the early 1970s, when he stayed several weeks with his wife and daughters on nearby Bedarra Island.
Bedarra was then a modest place, with a few holiday cabins on the beach and a resident recluse, Noel Woods. Woods is still there, but the rest of the tiny island has become one of the most exclusive and expensive holiday retreats in the world.
You can get to Bedarra by a launch from Dunk in 15 minutes. The island is like an illustration from a children's storybook, a sudden pointed green mound in the sea. The place intensifies the more democratic pleasures of Dunk, offering discreetly the best desert- island fantasy money can buy. Bedarra Bay takes a maximum of 32 people and children under 15 are banned. Guests stay in luxurious wooden cabins built in the shady thickets of the rainforest, just a few steps away from two perfect crescent beaches. Exquisite food and every conceivable drink are always available. You help yourself. It was a blow to hear that Fergie chose it for a well-publicised getaway; indeed the only snag in such a small place might well be proximity to your fellow guests.
The pleasures of Dunk are for ordinary, reasonably lucky people. One of the advantages of such holidays in Australia is that they can be enjoyed without more than a flicker of guilt. The closest parallel to the North Queensland islands must be the Caribbean; but at a similar enchanted bay on Antigua, all the guests were white and all the staff were black. On Dunk, guests and the staff were indistinguishable, except that the staff were mostly better dressed. As for the stingers, it was hard to discover how nervous one should be. After our first swim in the shallow waters of Brammo Bay, we saw a sign saying they might be present between October and April and that, if stung, victims should apply vinegar from the large plastic bottles below the sign and get help, quickly. One resort employee told me cheerfully that the last sting was 10 years ago; another said equally cheerfully, ``yesterday". We managed to establish that serious stings are almost unheard of away from the coast. But as even a minor sting can be horribly painful and frightening, it would be wise to be careful; Dunk is only five kilometres from the shore. But then, no paradise can be real without a hidden menace; no Garden of Eden complete without a lurking snake.
Getting there.
DUNK ISLAND Resort is offering a special seven-night (two nights free) package until 12 April for mid-week travel. Costs: ex-Melbourne from $947 per person twin share in unit-style accommodation; singles $1124.
Extra nights: $95 per person twin share per night or $125 for singles.
Add $65 per person for three meals per day; breakfast and dinner packages $49 per day; breakfast $22.
Dunk has four styles of accommodation with a range of prices to match. For more information call toll-free 008 81 2525 or ask your local travel agent.
© 1995 The Age
