An Island Paradise of Sand
IN 1770, British explorer Captain James Cook sailed up the east coast of Australia. A little over a hundred miles [150 km] north of the present-day city of Brisbane, he passed a large, sandy coastal island that would, in time, attract 300,000 visitors annually. Cook, however, paid little attention to it. In fact, he and others assumed that it was a peninsula, not an island. A few years later, explorer Matthew Flinders actually came ashore. “Nothing could be more barren than this peninsula,” he wrote. Had Cook and Flinders ventured beyond the miles of golden beaches and dunes, they would have formed a very different opinion. They would have encountered a world of pristine rain forests, crystal-clear freshwater lakes, cliffs of spectacularly colored sands, and hundreds of species of animals. Now called Fraser Island, this largest sand island in the world is so remarkable that it was placed on the World Heritage List in 1992.