Australia: Queensland – Magnetic Island

🏝️ Magnetic Island, Queensland: A Dollar Bus, No Koalas and a Very Long Walk

The morning turned up with rather more enthusiasm than I managed myself. The night before had involved what Janice and Gary cheerfully called a six-hour happy hour, which, when you actually examine it, is just dinner with good intentions and absolutely no dinner. The Queensland light coming through the curtains the next morning was doing me no favours at all. I want to stress that I was not, technically, hungover. I was simply operating at something a good deal less than full capacity. Call it sixty percent, with the other forty percent given over entirely to quietly reviewing the decisions that had led me to this point in my life.

Getting out of bed took more willpower than I knew I had left in me at this age. We showered, dressed, got some breakfast down and pointed ourselves towards Townsville’s ferry terminal, with the idea of catching the 9.30 crossing over to Magnetic Island. This sounds like the sort of plan that ought to go off without a hitch. It did not.

🚗 The Car Park, the Sprint, and Other Indignities

The car park at the terminal was full. Not nearly full, not mostly full — full in the comprehensive, not-a-single-space, don’t-even-bother sense of the word. It was a Saturday, which in retrospect I really should have worked out for myself, hangover or no hangover. We found a spot on the street easily enough — Townsville seems to manage its weekend parking with more sense than most British seaside towns ever have — but that meant doing what I can only describe as a middle-aged sprint back to the terminal. It is every bit as undignified as it sounds. We made it onto the ferry with about a minute to spare, stood on the quayside breathing rather more heavily than either of us would like to admit, and did our best to look like two people who had planned it that way all along.

The crossing itself takes around twenty minutes — long enough to get your breath back, not so long that you start fretting about whether you left the gas on at home. Magnetic Island sits roughly eight kilometres off Townsville, out in the Coral Sea, and it has a name that sounds entirely invented but turns out to be perfectly genuine, with a proper explanation behind it. When Captain Cook sailed past in 1770, his compass apparently started behaving oddly as he passed the island, and he concluded — sensibly enough, given the instruments of the day — that the place must be magnetic. Geologists these days reckon his compass was probably playing up before he ever got near it, but nobody has cared enough to rename the island, and so it has remained Magnetic Island ever since. Cook, while he was at it, also named the bay alongside Townsville Cleveland Bay.

What Magnetic Island has ended up with is something genuinely unusual: about seventy percent of the entire island is national park. That is an enormous proportion of land to set aside, and it gives the place a landscape of granite headlands, eucalyptus woodland and quiet bays, all populated by wildlife that has not the slightest interest in being convenient about when or where it shows itself. This would turn out to be relevant.

⛴️ Nelly Bay and the One-Dollar Bus

We landed at Nelly Bay, the island’s main settlement, which manages to be both genuinely laid-back and just a touch pleased with itself for being so. There is a marina, a few cafés, some accommodation, and the general atmosphere of somewhere that knows it has landed rather well in the location department and has decided there is no need to shout about it.

We got straight onto the island bus, which runs the length of the one main road connecting the various bays. The all-day pass costs one Australian dollar. I will write that again in case you skipped over it: one dollar. For the entire day. You could ride that bus from one end of the island to the other and back again as many times as your enthusiasm allowed, and it would still cost you one dollar. This pleased me so much that I very nearly forgot about my sixty-percent morning altogether.

🐨 Setting Off Along the Forts Walk

We got off the bus near the Horseshoe Bay Road turnoff and set out on the Forts Walk, a heritage trail of around 3.8 kilometres there and back, climbing through dry eucalyptus woodland and stands of hoop pine into the island’s interior, with an elevation gain of something like 183 metres along the way. It is graded moderate rather than easy, and by the time we were a third of the way up I understood exactly why. The track is well-kept, with proper hand-built staircases at the steeper bits, and well signposted with interpretive panels that I was very glad of, because they gave me an excuse to stop walking and pretend I was reading.

The trail also comes with a considerable reputation attached to it for wildlife: Magnetic Island is supposed to have one of the highest densities of wild koalas anywhere in Australia. Not just in Queensland — anywhere in the country. The island’s koala population numbers somewhere in the low hundreds, which sounds like quite a lot until you remember that koalas are solitary, mostly nocturnal, sleep for up to twenty-two hours a day wedged into tree forks, and are roughly the colour of bark. Finding one requires sharp eyes, a fair bit of patience, or the kind of luck that had rather deserted us already that morning over the matter of car parking. The island’s koalas are, interestingly, a genetically distinct population from those on the mainland, having been cut off here long enough to develop their own characteristics, and they feed almost exclusively on a handful of specific eucalyptus species — of which, fortunately for them, the island has rather a lot.

We walked with the dutiful optimism of two people who had read the leaflet and believed every word of it. Every promising fork in a tree got a thorough inspection. Every rustle in the canopy was investigated with real commitment. We craned our necks upward at every opportunity and were rewarded, time after time, with absolutely nothing. Not a single koala. The walk itself is lovely, mind — the light through the eucalyptus has a particular silvery quality to it, and the granite outcrops give the whole landscape a sort of prehistoric drama — but our koala count remained stubbornly at zero the whole way up.