How to explore Australia's islands

The Man Who Pays His Way: Captain Cook’s journey north from Botany Bay was evidently not a laugh a minute, via Mount Warning, Cape Tribulation and Point Sorrow

(Tony Wheeler)

Desperate to escape the gloom of November and/or the doom of electioneering far behind? An island-off-an-island is always a wise plan.

Warmth lingers long into the year in the southern Mediterranean, so you might contemplate Gozo, Malta’s smaller sibling and one-sixth scale model. Or even the fascinating fortress island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony facing the end-of-the-world Cretan resort of Elounda. That’s what I call a marginal constituency.

Yet you could get much further from the democratic discord, to the back of a distant beyond.

Early summer is taking hold in the southern hemisphere, and November air fares are absurdly low. On Thursday afternoon I checked prices for a departure that evening from London to Sydney, and found plenty of availability at under £600 return (that’s less than two weeks’ work at the national minimum wage).

But does the island continent have much to offer in terms of islands, let alone islands-off-islands?

Plenty, according to Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet. He was commissioned by the National Library of Australia to write the definitive guide to the isles that surround that familiar lump of wilderness (embroidered by some human habitation) sitting south of Indonesia and New Guinea.

You can, of course, name the obvious island (Tasmania, regrettably omitted from maps from time to time), and perhaps a few others: Fraser, Kangaroo, Rottnest and the Whitsundays. But Mr Wheeler points out it has more than 8,000 others – leaving Australia with clear blue water from the Philippines and the entire Caribbean (barely 7,000 each).

His favourite: Lizard Island, for “spectacular scenery, beautiful beaches, coral and diving,” not forgetting the monitor lizard – one of Australia’s biggest predators.

But the writer has also been travelling to the far north of the nation, and the Torres Strait Islands scattered from Cape York in Queensland to almost the shores of Papua New Guinea. On the map, they look like stepping stones – many are the remains of a land bridge that was submerged 8,000 years ago.

Today, getting around these islands is easier than it was. But Mr Wheeler reports some unusual travel procedures.

“Don’t bother arriving at the airport until the incoming flight arrives,” he advises, “because the check-in scales will be on the aircraft.”

On arrival at a new island: “Immediately start greeting everybody. You’re going to need a ride with one of them since there is no other transport.”

Hitch-hiking is normal. But on Darnley Island, Mr Wheeler had a experience like none other in his half-century of thumbing around the world. On his way back from the supermarket (there are no restaurants) to the guest house, he got a lift in a pick-up.

“The driver asked where else I planned to go. I said I was heading over to Kemus – the beach where the first missionaries arrived in 1871, and said I would walk if I couldn’t get a lift.

“Oh, that’s far too far to walk,” his driver insisted.

“My house is just beyond your guest house. I’ll leave the car in the driveway with the keys in the glovebox. Help yourself.” Which he did.

Oh, and that archipelago off the coast of Queensland should arguably be the Whitmondays; when Captain Cook sailed through the islands, his log insisted it was Sunday because the notion of a date line had yet to be conceived.

Whitsunday is at least cheerier than some of the captain’s nomenclature applied to geographical features on his voyage north from Botany Bay (now the location for Sydney airport). It was evidently not a laugh a minute: Mount Warning, Cape Tribulation and Point Sorrow.

If you prefer less menacing-sounding isles, make for an-island-off-an-island-off-an-island: south of Dunk Island is Bedarra Island, and southeast of that is Wheeler Island (no relation). A tangle of eucalyptus on one side, rainforest on the other. There are worse places to be right now.

‘Islands of Australia: Travels through Time’ by Tony Wheeler is published by the National Library of Australia