Cold comfort in Hervey Bay; grilled fish and no chips; Fraser Island Day Tour: the wonderful Wayne and his whopping 4X4, horrible history, Central Station, Eli Creek, 75 Mile Beach drive and the Maheno shipwreck; a tale of two Marys – Maryborough and Mary Poppins
I’m being consciously strategic with this order of events. Maryborough came first; then Hervey Bay, the launchpad for Fraser Island. But an island is always going to be sexier than Mary Poppins – and Fraser Island was what we’d come here for.
Cold comfort at Comfort Inn on Main, Hervey Bay
My choice of the Comfort Inn (66-68 Main Street, Hervey Bay) was unfortunate. Especially after we’d driven along Hervey Bay’s, long, long Esplanade lined with sea-facing accommodation, I could hear Roy – first silently and then vocally – wondering why I’d settled on this “self-storage facility”.
I don’t even have a photograph – and don’t be fooled by the pretty website photos. It’s one of those typically soul-less American-style motels comprising two terraced rows of units separated by a tarred courtyard/parking area, redolent with stale cigarette smoke and the toxic stuff they spray to mask the odour.
However, nowhere that’s within walking/jogging distance of the sea can be all bad. Leaving my fulminating husband to his own dark devices in our Executive Queen Room, I turned right and right again (a serendipitous circumstance, given my directional challenges), heading for the beach.
Ten minutes later I was on the dark-golden sand, the tide was way out, and the twilight glow over the interestingly serrated terrain was magical.
Review: Beach House Hotel, Hervey Bay: Fish and no chips
Dining options in Hervey Bay were less plentiful than you might expect in a holiday town this size and this busy. Some of them, like the popular Enzo’s on the Beach, close soon after sunset, well before 6pm at this time of year. So we ended up having grilled gold-band snapper* ($30) at the big, busy and popular Beach House Hotel on the Esplanade, washed down with a couple of large glasses / small buckets of pinot grigio ($9 each).
(* I should explain that whenever I say we had fish, we ordered grilled fish and whatever salad (or vegetables) we could get – not chips. Never chips. That’s because chips fried in canola, sunflower or other seed oil are the work of the Devil. That said, by the time this trip was over, we were fed up to the gills with grilled fish and salad.)
At a nearby table, two ladies of a certain age ordered the crayfish special – $25 for a half-tail, $50 for a whole one – and it looked to be great value. Another neighbouring table – possibly rendered magnanimous by their own generous glasses of wine – warmly recommended the seafood feast ($65 for two).
Fraser Island Day Tour
So appalled was he by his Spartan surroundings, for once Roy was not reluctant to rise from the marital bed at dawn to be picked up for the All-Inclusive Fraser Island Day Tour that I had booked a few days earlier.
For $249 each, we would: “Spend an incredible day exploring the natural beauty of Fraser Island, seeing highlights such as Central Station, Wanggoolba Creek, Lake McKenzie, Eli Creek, Seventy-Five Mile Beach, the Pinnacles and the Maheno Shipwreck.”
Our outstanding guide and driver, Wayne, seemed tense to start with, but then again he has a hectic job. Imagine having to wake up at sparrow-fart to prepare your bus, pick up a string of passengers – some of them late at their appointed spot; brief each new lot individually and get them to upload and fill in the various Covid-related and other arse-covering indemnity forms that go with the territory; and get them to the jetty in time to stand shivering while the ferry loads first vehicles and then passengers.
And that’s just the start of a long day involving a lot of talking, four-wheel-driving (you transfer to 4WD coaches once on the island) and idiot-herding – before taking each of us back whence we had come. Fortunately, Wayne absolutely loves driving, he says; and the rougher the terrain, it seems, the better.
Fraser Island is 15km off the coast of Hervey Bay and is famous (1) for being the worlds’s biggest sand island, (2) for its perched lakes, and (3) for rainforest that grows on dunes.
It measures 123km from north to south, an average of 15km across the middle, and is 2km longer at low tide (says Wayne). The sand comes from a disintegrated Godwanaland massive mountain range dating back 500 million years ago. Australia itself was formed only 45 million years ago; and Fraser Island formed some two million years ago.
Sort of like an iceberg, the island you see now is just the top of a vast underground swathe of sand. Six ecosystems have been identified, each with its own dune system.
On the way to Lake McKenzie, Wayne told the Aboriginal Butchulla community’s creation story. (Their traditional name for the island is K’gari, or Paradise.) And throughout the day, he shared snippets of Fraser Island’s brutal frontier history. Native title was recently granted to the mere handful of the surviving descendants of the Butchulla. For background, see websites like this one and this one.
First stop, Lake McKenzie
Fraser Island has over a hundred lakes – each categorised as either a window lake, a barrage lake or a perched lake. At 109m above sea level, Lake McKenzie is one of its 42 perched lakes (around half the global total) – how these form is explained here. We spent a full hour here, enough for me to walk-jog barefoot to the end of that sandy point on the right. (My calves knew all about that the next day.) Afterwards, the water temperature was perfect for a dip.
Second stop, Central Station
Each of these 4WD coaches, made in Germany, costs a cool $750,000!
From Lake McKenzie, Wayne whizzed down a rough track, entering an area of subtropical rain forest, to Central Station – where government agents, loggers and their wives lived in the 1800s. The discovery of kauri pines, perfect for the masts of sailing ships, launched 120 years of logging.
Reseeding started in 1904, especially of satinay trees, which were highly desirable worldwide. This put Hervey Bay on the world map. But on 5 November 1991, the last tree was cut (a brushwood, apparently). In January 1992, Fraser Island received its Unesco World Heritage listing.
Wayne spent his childhood holidays romping around this island. What’s more, his own grandfather was a logger here, so he is full of interesting stories.
(Apart from his granddad’s stories, his own experiences, and various internet sources, Wayne says he picked up insights from a book by one Fred Williams titled Princess K’Gari’s Fraser Island.)
Apparently, a stag horn epiphyte like the one above would fetch $1,00o on the open market. Why? As arguably attractive as it may be, why would anyone spend a grand on it for the pleasure of watching it shrivel and die, as plants do? (As my plants do, anyway.)
When you think how perilous Australia’s mainland water supply can be, it’s astonishing to hear how much fresh water is to be found on Fraser Island. Every hour of every day, more than four million litres of fresh water flows out of Eli Creek into the ocean. I drank from Lake McKenzie and it was delicious.
Over $3 million was spent on the construction of this boardwalk at Eli Creek says Wayne. But as it protects the ecosystem, he reckons it was money well spent.
Ancestors of the dinosaur ferns that grow here date back 200 million years. This is the only place on the island where you will find the king fern, says Wayne.
Lunch was at Eurong Beach Resort – but not before our guide had regaled us with stories of its maverick founder. In brief, the late tourism pioneer Sid Melksham (aka Savage Sid, or the Barefoot Tycoon) honeymooned here in 1959, and despite a calamitous honeymoon, saved up his money and came back with his wife in 1963 to lease a parcel of land for $2K. Over the next 40 years, this entrepreneur built up a huge empire, including ferries and a fleet of charter aircraft, that he sold in 2004 for $43M. Wow!
75 Mile Beach
A highlight of the day was hurtling along this beach with Wayne at the wheel of the coach, dodging rocks and sand traps. You have to have a 4WD on Fraser Island, and this long stretch of golden sand is navigable only at low tide.
A few of us took turns to sit up front with him. Interestingly, 75 Mile Beach is an official highway; the Highway Code applies. It also doubles as an ad hoc airstrip, we soon discovered.
On the way north to the Maheno shipwreck, someone spotted a large pod of migrating whales – ’twas the season – and Wayne stopped the bus for some ooh-ing and ah-ing.
Then the option of an aeroplane flight was presented. For an extremely reasonable $100, you could take off from 75 Mile Beach to be flown over the waves, up close and personal with the whales, before joining the 4WD coach back on the beach. Two or three people took up the offer and were glad they’d done so; but the visibility wasn’t good enough to tempt me into such a small aircraft.
Wreck of the SS Maheno
Washed ashore by a cyclone in 1935, the ocean liner SS Maheno belonged to the Union Company of New Zealand. How picturesque this wreck looks changes with the tides: it could be standing proud of the water, or more covered with sand, as it was today.
Maryborough – childhood home of Mary Poppins’ author
From Eumundi, it had been a 137km drive north to Maryborough on the way to Hervey Bay. And in case you were wondering, the two Marys are a coincidence that has been happy exploited. Maryborough takes its name from the Mary River, named in 1847 after Mary Lennox, the wife of the then Governor of NSW.
Maryborough was once slated to be the capital of Queensland, but that never happened. Nevertheless, Maryborough Civic Centre is described as a splendid cluster of elegantly architectural heritage buildings*, including the Town Hall, the Court House, the Post Office and the Old Fire Station.
*It can be entertaining to compare the tourism authority and other official descriptions of places with what you actually find when you get there. Here are a few: (1) Maryborough is “one of the friendliest and tidiest smaller cities Queensland has to offer” – damning with faint praise, or what?; (2) Maryborough is “one of Queensland’s oldest and most loved destinations”; (3) Maryborough “tells the tales of a captivating colonial past… has Australia’s finest military museum outside of Canberra”; and (4) is “rich in history and opportunity”.
What we found – apart from the very handsome civic buildings, as advertised – was a slightly downtrodden CBD with closed hotels and a too-large pawnshop, a town that we suspected had been hard-hit by Covid. But we later heard, from locals, that no – it had always been like that.
The Mary Poppins legacy
Today, its main claim to fame – and what makes it genuinely worth visiting – is that it was the childhood home of P L Travers, the creator of the world’s most famous nanny. Prolific author Pamela Lyndon Travers was born here (as Helen Lyndon Goff) in 1899, in the old Australian Joint Stock Bank.
This building was beautifully restored in 2018-19 to become what is now an interactive museum and renamed the Story Bank of Maryborough. (Granddaughter Mia could have spent hours here; even Roy and I thoroughly enjoyed it – a well-spent $10 each.)
A life-size bronze-cast statue of Mary Poppins stands near to her creator’s birthplace. An annual Maryborough festival brings Mary Poppins characters to life: chimney sweeps compete in the Chimney Sweep Dash, nannies push prams in the Nanny Challenge, and so on and so forth.
No blog post would be complete without a record of Roy and his quest for coffee – so here it is, followed by a couple of Maryborough’s many murals.
A fascinating adventure in a strange Australian medley of things. Thank you for sharing. Roy looks slim and surprised by his plate of chicken for lunch. A coach on a beach; only in Australia and costing 750k!! Godwanaland II is apparently where we will end up when the tectonic plates come to the end of their movement.
Thanks for your acute observations, Paul! See you in Godwananland II in due course. xx