Christening Queensland 'The Sunshine State' was hardly a stroke of genius. Even in a country as meteorologically euphoric as Australia, Queensland is still home to the country's best beaches, best diving and best island hopping opportunities, but it's Queensland's near perfect weather that has her laidback locals telling us that "Queensland is beautiful one day, perfect the next." Yet with over 2000km of idyllic coastline and a more than liberal sprinkling of coral cays to choose from, there is still one island in particular that holds an even stronger attraction.
Magnetic Island is a piece of climatic perfection that lies seductively off the mainland, 8km from Townsville and a world away from the kiss-me-quick dullery of Blackpool. Maggie was named by Captain Cook several centuries ago and since then, aside from the arrival of the odd pleasant village and not so pleasant soap-dodging backpacker, little has changed. The island is still the sunniest part of the sunniest state with an incredible 320 sun-soaked days a year, so it's easy to see why, when God needed to rest on the 7th day, He threw his deck-chair on a Maggie Island beach.
I'd heard tales of Maggie's beauty whilst snorkelling the reef off the coast of Cairns, so headed south to take a look. The whole route from Cairns to Townsville is carpetted with sugar cane, an experimental crop introduced from South America, that, like cane toads and mooching Poms, thrived in Queensland's balmy climate and now covers its entire eastern seaboard. In fact so big is Queensland's sugar industry that the cane train that transports the state's harvested sugarcane is the largest privately owned rail system in the world, and provides Australia with half of its sugary needs.
After a long but pleasant trip south, I pulled into Townsville, self-proclaimed capital of the north, as the late afternoon sun was setting behind Castle Hill and the pleasant coastal town shimmered gold. Townsville itself is worth a stop for its burst of attractive gold-rush buildings, large aquarium, decent nightlife, and the chance to ditch that telemarketing job and extend your work visa by fruit picking in one of the nearby villages. But by far the best reason to come to Townsville is to leave, and hop the ferry across to Magnetic Island.
A twenty minute ride brought us to Nelly Bay where we jumped on a windowless bus for the short trip to the über-cool Base Backpackers; a flash-packer heaven which proudly proclaims itself the only backpackers in Australia situated on the beach. Any hostel that has sea views for the price of a dorm bed is good in anyone's book, and with its groovy wooden A-Frames, loose-as-a-goose bar (home to its legendary full moon parties) and wooden decked pool area, Base is the sort of place one could easily come to retire. And what better way to start one's retirement than by hitting the bar and taking advantage of the rubber-armed bar staff, then taking a fully clothed midnight baptism in Maggie's balmy ocean?
But be warned: Magnetic Island can be a time-warp Bermuda Triangle, and that two day trip can suddenly turn into weeks or months, and you suddenly recognise a greying of the temples and a furring of the chin, and you start to fear for the life of your tropical fish. I got talking to one such case, Helen, who had clearly been attracted by the island's magnetism and stayed for far too long;
"Aren't harbours weird?" she cooed in an almost profound Welsh lilt, "They're like car-parks on water." Be sure to make it out whilst you still can.
I woke early the next morning, the sun predictably beating down, to ponder the eternal question; if this is Paradise then why do I have a hangover? Luckily Base excels in artery clogging cure-alls, so after sticking my snout in a trough of bacon and eggs, and swallowing my own body weight in coffee, I felt like I could take on the world, but settled on hiking over the headland to Picnic Bay for my first glimpse of Maggie's beauty exposed in the daylight.
And for someone of her age (275 million years old and counting) Maggie is quite the stunner. The views to the mainland over the island's 23 bays and beaches are spectacular, but it's the colours that make the island so special. The azures and aquamarines of the cloudless sky and ocean, and the lush greens of the foliage and flashes of colour as parakeets screeched past are almost kaleidoscopic and trippy, and I realised that one night on the island simply isn't enough.
Naturally the majority of any visit to the island is spent soaking up the rays and chilling on the beach, but should you have the strength, madness or inclination, the Forts Walk is a mildly strenuous 4km plod across the middle of the island through an open forest of hoop pines, bloodwoods, and stringybarks to visit the machine gun nests built during the Second World War in case of a Japanese invasion. The walk also gives you the opportunity to spot one of the many wild koalas that inhabit the island after they were introduced in the 1930s in response to threats to their survival on the mainland. Without any natural predators (rising sea levels cut the island off from the mainland 7500 years ago), the koala population has propagated in their Chlamydia-filled glory to such a degree that Magnetic Island now proudly accounts for the highest density of wild koalas in Northern Australia and the little critters are easy to spot furring the branches of the
island's many eucalypts.
In fact, over half of the island's 5184 hectares is protected national park, so it's not just the mopesing marsupials that call the island home. Rock wallabies, possums, echidnas, flying foxes and the highly toxic, and appropriately named, death adder, can be found soaking up the sun on Maggie's pathways and in her branches, so walking anywhere on the island will almost guarantee a chance wildlife encounter.
And of course should one tire of her land-based activities, Magnetic Island, as luck would have it, is surrounded by ocean. The only time I spent in the briny was when I leapt, jeans first, into the surf after one Pimms too many, but the ocean around Magnetic Island is positively wriggling with turtles and dugongs, and the many shipwrecks, some natural, most scuttled, make for great diving. The ocean here is mirror flat as the Great Barrier Reef kills any waves long before they hit the island, making it safe for swimming any time outside stinger season, and with the reef starting right from the beach, the opportunities for land based snorkelling are endless. With a bit more time, one can get an open water certificate, and for the advanced there is the Yongala wreck dive; frequently voted as one of the best wreck sites in the world.
But alas I had one night, not nearly enough time to soak up the rays or atmosphere of the island, so I sat, glumly, on one of the island's many granite boulders, the sun on my face, waiting for the ferry back to the mainland, safe in the knowledge that such is the pull of Magnetic Island, I would some day be drawn right back.
