Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 3: K’gari
Let’s start with Fraser Island. Because it’s my favourite.
We’d worked our way up the east coast by then, and it had all been lovely. Every bit of it. Right up until Brisbane, obviously. But then we got out the other side, and we got to Fraser, and the trip actually started.
Fraser Island is the largest sand island on earth. Not an island with sand on it — an island that is nothing but sand, hundreds of metres deep, the whole thing, and somehow covered head to foot in forest. Trees the height of a building, growing out of a sandbank. It shouldn’t work. It’s been working for a few hundred thousand years.
I should say its name properly, because they renamed it K’gari a couple of years back — its real name, the Butchulla name, the one it had before a shipwrecked woman gave it hers. I’m still training my mouth to it. K’gari. The old name comes out of me by reflex and I correct it, every time, and one day the correction won’t be needed. Fair enough. It’s their island. It always was.
Because it’s all sand, the roads are sand. All of them — including the main highway, which is the beach. You drive straight up the ocean side, on the wet hard sand below the tide line, and the highway closes twice a day when the sea comes in and takes it back. That’s life on K’gari. The whole island runs on a tide chart. You move when the water lets you and you stop when it doesn’t, and after a day or two you stop fighting it, and that turns out to be the point.
We left the caravan behind in a park on the mainland — no caravan was getting where we were going. Geared up for proper camping. Let the tyres down soft, down to sand pressure, so they’d float over it instead of digging in. And we crossed on the ferry while the beach came apart around us.
Because there’s no dock. There’s no jetty, no ramp, no infrastructure of any kind. It’s sand to sand — the ferry drops a steel ramp onto the beach and you drive off onto the most unstable sand in the country, four-wheel-drive only, and that sand collapses. Not rarely. Every few months a section gives way and takes whatever’s on it — a car, sometimes a whole caravan, straight down. It collapsed the day we crossed. The exact spot we drove off the boat was simply gone by the time we came back for it. The sea had taken it. The island had moved.
And I stood there and thought: yes. This. This is why we came.
We spent a few days exploring K’gari, and I’ll tell you the best of it before I get to the rest of it.
The beach, first. I told you the highway is the beach — what I didn’t tell you is what that’s actually like. Mile after mile of hard wet sand, dead straight, the ocean on one side and the dune forest on the other, and you drive it like a road because it is the road. It’s interrupted here and there by little freshwater streams running down to the sea, and you slow to cross them — unless you’re under twenty-five, in which case the entire point of being under twenty-five is to hit the stream at speed, because at that age it’s better to risk your vehicle, your passengers, and your future than your ego.
Do watch for planes, though. They land on the beach too. There’s no airstrip — there’s the beach — so every so often a light aircraft drops out of the sky and onto the highway in front of you and taxis along the sand like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, which, here, it is. You give way to the plane. Obviously.
Most of them put down near Eli Creek, which is where everyone stops anyway. You walk out along a wooden boardwalk that leads you up the creek, and then you climb down into it — it’s about knee deep, clear, running at a fast walking pace — and you lie down. On an airbed, a tyre tube, a pool noodle, another human being, anything that floats. And the creek carries you back down to the sea. That’s it. That’s the whole activity. It’s far more fun than it has any right to be, and there’s a queue of grown adults waiting to do it again.
Further along you pass the wreck — the Maheno, a great rusted ocean liner half-swallowed by the sand, beached in a cyclone a century ago and then used for bombing practice in the war. Which is, when you think about it, the whole of Australian history in one hull: here’s a thing we made a mess of, and now we live in it, and somehow it’s so magnificent in its own right that we get by. You photograph it. Everyone photographs it.
Every so often the beach runs into rocks, and you take a tricky little bypass track over the headland through sand gone soft and deep. I watched exactly one vehicle get properly bogged the whole time — a bloke who’d brought a two-wheel-drive onto K’gari, and thereby earned everything that was happening to him.
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