Frazer Island
Frazer Island - Forest in Sands
Frazer Island, like the Great Barrier Reef, is a World Heritage. It is the world’s largest sand island. Frazer Island got its name from the victim of a shipwreck, Eliza Frazer. With the mind-boggling natural scenery – sand blows that stretch far and wide to get the mind lost in infinity, mangrove forests that spread out like the feathers of the eagle all over the place, beaches that sooth the psyche with the tantalizing touch of sands, rainforests whose density and rootedness set the imagination aroving in the attempt to penetrate the thickness of the blanket, the forest itself, that envelopes their inhabitants the trees, daunting exploration, daring the human plunge into the unknown, and the streams, the friends of crystals – clear with the therapeutic feminity of touch that is a balm to strain and stress.
Even with all this, the wonders of Frazer Island are just unfolding.
Now here is what shakes conventionality to the core and shatters it. It is conventional that trees grow in the forest with their roots in the solid earth which holds them firmly to the ground so they can stand aloft. But what can you say to the solid earth being replaced by sands, sands like the grains of salt, holding in their hands and lifting the trees far above all most of the other trees in the world for all to see? These sands are to be found in Frazer Island. And the trees are the tall and lofty fir trees. A wonder because grains of salt as sands or pebbles cannot hold anything to the ground. There must be something that holds the sands together which holds the roots such that the sands flow into one another like two rivers sharing a bank to hold the roots.
Oh, all this is science, you may say, when you only come to Frazer Island to forget it all and serenade in the pool of bounty and beauty of Nature. Forgive! Even with this, you can be sure that as you move from one wonder to the other in this island, indeed from the window, barrage and perched lakes – the three types of Lakes in Frazer Island – and reach the lakes themselves such as Yankee Jack, Wabby, lakes McKenzie, Boomanjin and others with their photogenic surfaces and surroundings and move on to Eli Creek and Maheno shipwreck and rainforests in sand, the only one of its kind on the planet, some of these, well, simple if sometimes hard questions would slip into the mindspace just like that. And this is normal.
It is normal that surrounded by the rainbow colours of Nature displayed on forests and lakes and birds and sands and sky and soil and being in them, becoming part of the colours too with your feelings flowing into the environment that flows back with the rose and lily freshness of Frazer Island, that the mind sallies out of the cocoon to which it has been driven by cares that are mostly unnatural but must be attended to – shopping, for example – to dwell on questions about, why with all the science, the politics, the commercial knowingness of economics, indeed with all the package of human engagement, is it not possible to get a piece of the peace in Nature in Frazer Island, in the Great Barrier Reef and in all the Parks here and there in Australia, in human societies everywhere?
Yes, between the time you were here last year and this time around again, a lot of upheavals have happened around, but the harmony that is Frazer Island is always there, waiting for you and shall always be there, ready to welcome you when next you are in Australia. All this is unlike the world you left behind where everything is fleeting, as fleeting as calling Jack Robinson and flying away on the kite or short-lived as the friendship of a fellow passenger on the journey to Katalamandu which is not on the map anyway and so you can forget it.
Here in Frazer Island, you can feel the flow of health in you and its breathtaking scenery in you to the extent that you never can forget because now Frazer Island is in you and you are also in Frazer Island.
No wonder it was named K’gari which means Paradise by the Butchulla people who lived on the island for over 5,500 years. And it is! The threat of dugong is overwhelmed by the majestic display of humpback whales, the grandma’s gentle stroll of the dolphins and the sonorous chirrups of the turtles.
Frazer Island is Nature’s paradise within the paradise of natural beauties of Australia.
