DESTINATION AUSTRALIA: Judith Elen celebrates solitary confinement and hunts for sustenance on a Coral Sea island
QUEENSLAND’S North Stradbroke Island,just 50km from Brisbane and framed by Moreton Bay, the South Pacific and the Coral Sea, has two faces: holiday mood and I-want-to-be-alone withdrawal. Come the school holidays, Straddie’s population trebles overnight. In the off-season, isolation is its second name.
I’m here in May and the mainland kids are at their desks. I love it; I’m all set to drink in the sea air and clamber the cliffs, eyes peeled for dolphins and dugongs. In the off-season, there are a few things you need to know to make the most of the solitude, and the first is to bring supplies.
I arrive at 4pm, off the 3pm ferry from Cleveland, and head for my accommodation at the northern tip of the island, intending to return to Dunwich, the west coast settlement, ferry stop and only real village. But by the time I reach Stradbroke Island Beach Hotel on the point, check in and drive back to Dunwich, it’s nearly 5pm and everything is closed like a clam shell. For an inner-city dweller, there’s something eerie about empty streets in broad daylight.
Though my hotel has a dozen rooms, I’m booked into an apartment, luxe and spacious, but without the usual hotel extras. Fabulous for people travelling with food, drinks, toiletries and CDs — in other words, good scouts who come prepared — it has space, style, comfort and location, location, location. Right above an empty beach and the restless sea, it is bliss sleeping here with the doors flung open to the sound of the waves.
