We're just back from a great holiday on Fraser Island. For those of you that don't know, not only is Fraser the largest sand island in the world, but it is also one of the few places where rainforest grows on sand and it is also home to more than half of the world's perched dune lakes. It's also where I did my PhD, so it's a pretty special place I reckon. I hadn't been back to Fraser Island since I finished my PhD in 2002, but teamed up with the Hoopers again (after our successful Lord Howe Island trip in April) I was ready to return and was really looking forward to showing Eli some of the amazing places on the island.
We took the vehicle barge from River Heads to Wanggoolba Creek and our first stop was at Central Station, right in the middle of the island, where Wanggoolba Creek cuts through beautiful rainforest.
We decided to do a hike and the kids opted for the walk to Basin Lake a 5.6 km return trip. It's fair to say that the kids don't have a good appreciation of what a kilometer is, because the other walk we suggested was significantly shorter. To their credit, Eli and Addie walked pretty much the whole return trip.
We got to Basin Lake just as a large tour group were about to leave, so we cooled our heals for a little while before exploring. We found heaps of sundews around the lake, many of them with small insect snacks trapped in the sticky fluid on their leaves. Eli and I also couldn't resist looking for frogs on the emergent reeds around the lake and we were lucky enough to find a few. The one in the photo below is the Cooloola sedge frog (Litoria cooloolensis).
After managing a nice long walk and having a spot of lunch at Central Station, we headed to the eastern beach and drove up to Happy Valley. Once we were unpacked, we headed down to the beach to explore. There are lots of small creeks that run out across the eastern beach of Fraser Island and I can remember exploring the one near Happy Valley when I first visited the island with my family back in the mid-1980s, so I was keen to have a look around. I particularly remembered catching small freshwater shrimp in this creek, so armed with a net and an enthusiastic Eli (who just wants to catch anything and everything at the moment) we set off and started looking. It turns out that my memory had served me well and Eli, Addie and I caught about ten shrimp, some of them quite large, from the little pool at the foot of a small waterfall. Eli was very excited and fortunately, he was also willing to let them go once we'd had our fun.
After our spot of fishing, we ran around on the beach and up and down the creek, with Jeff, Paige and I on duty and keeping a watchful eye out for dingoes and vehicles on the beach. One dingo did come and smell out our beach towels, but it didn't give us any trouble.
The next morning we set off early for Eli Creek! I'd been priming Eli for this location for a few weeks before our holiday started, not just because it is 'his creek', but also because it's just such a fun place to visit. To the local indigineous people, the word Eli means sandcrab and I think that's a nice description of my Eli too.
Eli and Addie were keen to explore the creek and armed with their boogie boards they were all set to jump in and go with the flow too. For personal and aesthetic reasons I took a lot of photos at Eli Creek - Eli actually started to get sick of requests to look and smile at the camera - so here are just a few of the many...
After a few trips up and down the creek other people started to arrive and we didn't realise how special it was to have the creek to ourselves for a while until we passed by Eli Creek again later in the day when there was several large visitor buses and probably about 15 or so other 4WD's - and this is not the peak tourism season!
The next stop on our list of must-sees was a visit to the Maheno shipwreck. We also saw a small plane come in and land on the beach, which is not something you see every day (unless you are on the beach on Fraser Island!).
As the tide was coming in, when decided to venture inland to continue our adventure. We stopped at Lake Allom for a spot of lunch and did the short walk around it before stopping at the platform and looked for turtles.
Not content with just viewing them, Eli wanted to get into the lake and swim with the turtles. Here he is, muscling up the courage to go into the dark waters of Lake Allom. And here's Uncle Jeff, almost being drowned by Eli, on the way back to the shore.
Now if you ask Eli about his trip to Fraser Island, he won't tell you about Eli Creek, or rainforests, or lakes or dingoes. Instead, he'll likely tell you about march flies and his ant colony. March flies are large biting flies (the female flies feed in mammalian blood) that are both annoying and painful and they're particularly abundant on Fraser Island during the summer months. Their presence meant that we were all constantly swatting at them in the hope that we'd get them before they got us. Now normally we don't really give a second thought to a swatted fly, but for some reason Eli was very keen to collect the dead march flies and take them to an ant colony out the back of the house we were staying in. He figured that the ants would like a feed and he was right. He actually stimulated a bit of a feeding frenzy in the backyard. One day, after delivering about 15 march flies to the colony, he started worrying about whether the ants would keep eating all night, or whether the cane toads would come and clean up what was left. After puzzling about this for a while, he decided to build a ring of coconuts around the ant colony to protect them (and their food) from cane toads. He also noticed that live march flies would land on the coconuts a lot, so he figured that the ants could supplement his supply by catching their own while we were away from the house each day. To his great delight, the march fly remains were still near the colony each morning (just a collection of wings and hard body parts). Here's a photo of Eli near his fortified ant colony (the large black dots are march flies) and a picture that he and I drew to record it as a highlight of the trip.
A trip to Fraser Island also wouldn't be complete without some dingo photos, so the next morning I snapped a few pics of a male dingo that we saw quite a few times, just near Happy Valley. He certainly wasn't concerned by us in the slightest, so Eli and I (in our 4WD) got a great look at him as he wondered from the surf up into the dunes.
After our dingo-spotting excitement we set off for Lake Wabby, a water table window lake that is slowly being consumed by a large sand blow. There are two ways to approach the lake and we decided that parking on the beach and walking through the forest and over the sand blow would be fun. We also hoped that the 6.5 km return distance wouldn't be a problem...Eli and Addie were great walkers once again and they stopped at maps to figure out what the best track would be to take. They were both pretty blown away (figuratively not literally) by the sand blow and Eli started a trend in rolling down the steep sections...
Here's the view back to the east from the top of the sandblow...
And here's the view (and a couple of sand rollers) towards the west and Lake Wabby.
Here's a contemplative, glare-affected and very sandy Eli, after a bit of rolling session...plus a few pics of us going up (slow) and down (fast) the steepest sectio of the sandblow towards the lake.
It was a hot long walk, so we all jumped into Lake Wabby to have a swim with the catfish...
The following day we headed down to the southern lakes and after a big of a drama getting off the beach, we finally made it to Lake Boomanjin, the largest perched dune lake in the world. And it's not just big, it's also impressively stained with tannins. Here are some photos of Eli and I venturing into a very full Lake Boomanjin, where their feet were yellow, their legs were red and their hands were orange...
After our swim, it was time for some lunch (inside the dingo fence again!). I really like this photo of Eli about to tuck into his cabana and cheese rice crackers and when he saw it he said 'hey, one of my eyebrows is up!'
We decided to finish off the day with a hike from Central Station to Pile Valley, where large Satinay trees (Syncarpia hillii) grow. This walk took us along the banks of Wanggoolba Creek again and it was a nice cool walk.
Our final day on Fraser Island included a visit to Lake McKenzie (Boorangoora) which is where I did most of my PhD research (and it's a rather nice spot for a swim too). It was really strange re-visiting this lake - it brought back a lot of good memories - and I really wanted to have brought the inflatable zodiac so I could head off and explore some of my less accessible sampling sites...
Despite my creative photography, there were (as always) heaps of other people here too, so it felt more like a public pool than a wilderness experience, but we did at least spot one of the more permanent residents near where we were swimming...
On the way off the island, on the barge back to River Heads, I did some exit polling of Eli and Addie to see what they thought of their Fraser Island adventure. For most questions I gave them three options to chose from - here are the questions and their answers...
1. Which was your favourite lake? Eli -- Boomanjin; Addie -- Boomanjin
2. Which was your favourite creek? Eli -- Eli; Addie -- Eli
3. Which was your favourite animal? Eli -- Ants; Addie -- Shrimp (despite the fact that we'd seen fish, dingoes, goannas, land mullet and skinks!)
4. Which was your favourite hiking adventure? Eli -- Lake Wabby; Addie -- Pile Valley
5. Which was your favourite place? Eli -- Central Station; Addie -- Central Station
In addition to these responses, both Eli and Addie liked the bumpy tracks and driving on the beach and critically, both correctly answered 'Uncle Jeff' when asked the question 'who bogged their vehicle in the soft sand?' (no prompting required from me). There was also concensus around the fact that 'Daddy/Uncle Wade' was the best driver (a point reinforced when I drove the Hoopers car through the aforementioned soft sand).
From a biological (control) perspective, Eli was unanimously nominated as the person who killed the most march flies (and it wasn't just us that benefited, Eli has some very grateful ant friends now too!). Addie was voted the person who found the most lady birds (fortunately using non-lethal collection methods). All in all, and as voted by Eli and Addie, everyone enjoyed their Fraser Island holiday!
