Australian Trip
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 5: Whitehaven Beach
Whitehaven Beach is our favourite place.
It’s everyone’s favourite place — one of the most photographed beaches in Australia, and with good reason. The sand is the thing. It’s almost pure silica, brilliant white, and it stays cool underfoot in full sun, and the story goes that it didn’t come from around here at all — that it arrived, a very long time ago, on an asteroid. It’s protected now. You can’t take it, you can’t mine it. We made exactly one exception, and shipped some off to be used in the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, on the grounds that a sand from space ought to get to go back to looking at it. I choose to believe that’s true whether it is or not.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at this point in the story we were wet.
I don’t think I’m conveying this properly. We were wet. We had come back to the coast from Carnarvon — from those clear hard blue skies and those minus-one nights — and dropped down to the Coral Sea, and the Coral Sea had a different idea about weather. We’d had a glorious first month or so on the road. And then we’d sailed straight into the wet season pattern, and it had now rained on us eighty days out of the last eighty-five.
I know it was eighty out of eighty-five because, at some point, I had begun to count. This is apparently the kind of man I am. I had also logged, more than once, over a hundred millimetres of rain in a single twenty-four hours — the famous once-in-a-hundred-years rain that, in Australia, turns up every couple of weeks looking faintly embarrassed. It found us again at Airlie Beach, where we were camped, waiting for the Whitsundays. On the swag. Because our daughter had flown up to join us for this leg — it was her uni holidays — and she wanted, specifically, to see Whitehaven Beach.
So we had a stake in the weather now, and the weather knew it.
We moved our boat day twice, watching the forecast, praying for a single blessing — and we landed it. The most glorious day. Blue sky, warm air, the sea gone flat and friendly, as if none of the preceding six weeks had happened.
An hour out on a fast boat. Snorkelling the Great Barrier Reef — which was everything it’s meant to be, and I could have stayed in it for the rest of my natural life, except that the itinerary gave us forty-five minutes here and forty-five minutes there and then it was time to move along, thank you, back on the boat. My wife and I are people who can happily snorkel one reef for half a day. We were given ninety minutes total and a schedule. Damn the schedule.
Then they fed us lunch. During hours in which we could, instead, have been snorkelling. I have made my peace with very little about that lunch.
And then they dropped us on the beach on the far side of the hill from Whitehaven, and you walk up and over to the famous lookout — the one in all the photos, the long white spit curling through the impossible turquoise — and you stand there and you say wow, because it is genuinely wow, and then you spend a while trying to get the photograph that ten thousand people a year stand in that exact spot to take. Everybody’s favourite. Everybody’s photo.
And then you walk down the track to the beach itself. With, in our case, our wildlife-averse daughter.
Where we were stopped by a snake.
A little green tree snake, bright as a leaf, sunning itself across the warm sand of the path down. Now — this is a snake that does not bite humans, and could not do you meaningful harm if it did. I knew this. Better still, I had phone signal, an almost unheard-of luxury, and I was able to look the thing up and present my daughter with the documented evidence of its complete harmlessness, right there on the screen.
None of that mattered in the slightest. It was a snake. One does not approach a snake. The data was noted and the data was irrelevant.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.