ISLE OF ENCHANTMENT

Evening Star, Issue 22274, 27 February 1936, Page 17

ISLE OF ENCHANTMENT

WEALTHY MAN'S PURCHASE The wealthy British sportsman, Hugo Brassey, is to take his bride, the beautiful Baroness Christa Von Bodenhausen, on a honeymoon holiday to a lonely island of the Barrier Reef, states a correspondent of the ‘ Sunday Graphic,’ London. The island is Dunk Island, uuroinantically named, but very beautiful, where romances may be discovered amid coral, golden sands, and soft breezes, where everything is, indeed, paradise, provided you have a motor boat, fishing gear, and enough cigarettes. Hugo Brassey has bought it. It seems strange that you can still buy an island, a liveable-on island, in this day and age. Actually, it’s a fine way of spending your money, but you will have to buy fast. The tourist companies are after the best of the islands, and they have the support of the Australian public and American tourists for those of the Great Barrier on the Queensland coast. Dunk Island, sitting at the head of the Family Group, is situated parallel with the canefields town of Tully, on the rail that runs to Townsville. It is small, well-watered, with plenty of shelter and good grass, with firm beaches and splendid fishing, palm trees and colonies of sea birds. It shares the equable climate of the region, where the weather is so much the same that it doesn’t even form a basis for conversation. I don’t know what other sport there is, although “ shooting ” is mentioned. Dunk Island probably has a goat or two for the honeymoon pair to try their skill upon. This synicism is just envy, for who •wouldn’t want a honeymoon in such idyllic surroundings? There are no sandflies or mosquitoes on these barrier islands. Instead, there are fish of such amazing colours that Americans send annual expeditions to take colour films of them; great turtles which lay. their eggs on the beach on still moonlit nights; game fish, as well as pictorial ones; and the amazing and never-end-ingly beautiful coral formations which form the Reef’s base. The Reef runs for hundreds of miles along the Queensland coast, broken into a series of islands of varying sizes. Some of them—for instance, Hayman and Lindeman Islands—are now established as geological hunting grounds. Others are tourist resorts —but not trippers’ resorts. The people who go to these islands for their holidays have neither cinemas nor dance halls, and all they wear is shorts, a shirt, and shoes wnen on the coral. On Lindeman Island, Melbourne Ward, sft high scientist, lives for nine months of the year collecting specimens for Australian and American museums. On Hayman Island naturalists from the technological museums of four States are gathered two or three times a year. It is here that the permanent overseer of the island grows orchids round his door as mammysingers grow roses. But the island is free to all who can pay £2O odd, plus steamer fare from whatever part of the mainland they come, asked by the Embury Expedition, which has a controlling interest in the island.