Lost in Paradise (Part 1)

Unexpected Perils in Australia

A Lizard Island flesh-eating lizard

It’s easy to get lost in Australia … even in a tiny, pretty, popular place.

I once disappeared on a small Great Barrier Reef island full of five-foot-long flesh-eating lizards … the aptly-named Lizard Island.

In 1979, The Australian heard that marine scientists on Lizard (160 miles north of Cairns) had built a platform on the outer Great Barrier Reef using steel-tube scaffolding tied to the coral.

The idea was that scientists could overnight on the platform to save a 30-mile return boat journey from Lizard.

My assignment: sleep a night on this platform out where the Pacific Ocean first pounds the Barrier Reef.

Not for me a bed in the ultra-exclusive Lizard Island Resort where Royalty and celebrities holiday.

That was for Travel Writers.

Instead, at the Scientific Station on the other side of Lizard Island, I was shown to “the Driftwood Suite’’ … a tent, from where I watched some of the half-dozen scientists walk down into the water in wet-suits to observe what the “fishes’’ were up to.

Then emerge like Creatures from the Black Lagoon several hours later.

However, the weather was too rough to get out to the platform. So, that night I read Captain Cook’s logbook account of what it was like out where the platform lay, and it suddenly came to me that this wasn’t going to be easy.

Captain Cook, one of Europe’s greatest seamen, had written when he passed by that reef back into the Pacific Ocean: “The sea broke very high, and I feared I should be charged with timorousness.’’

Well if Captain Cook was scared, then what about me?

It was Captain Cook two centuries before who named this island after encountering numerous huge monitor lizards when he crossed the island to climb the 1,200-foot mountain.

He was looking for a way out through the ribbon-like barrier of reefs into the Pacific in his damaged ship Endeavour.

And that’s how he got out.

(In fact, according to Cook’s log, he climbed it twice in 24 hours – once in daylight, and again at night, with no track to follow back then.)

After reading his logs I found the mountain calling me: the land appealing far more than the sea.

Next day, the weather was still too rough to be able to reach the platform so, bored, I filled a beer bottle with drinking water and set off from my tent, alone, up the mountain to see for myself the look Cook took.

On the internet now it warns that climbing that mountain is “not for the faint-hearted”. But I didn’t know that then.

It also says it takes 2 to 3 hours to get to the top.

I was ignorant of that fact too.

As I followed a rarely-used ill-defined track ever upwards, I gained admiration for Cook’s physical fitness.

How did he do it, living on salted meat, rum, and lemon juice?

After an hour or two, I knew what my favourite poet Alexander Pope meant when he wrote 300 years earlier: “Hills mount on hills and Alps on Alps arise’’.

Every time I thought I could see the summit just up ahead, it turned out to be just another crest along the way.

False hope after false hope.

Eventually, my water long gone, I made it to a stone cairn on top and – just like Captain Cook – looked out to the broken line of reefs that form north Australia’s great outer barrier to the Pacific Ocean.

I looked for the platform – not yet realising that it was far too thin and frail and insignificant to be seen from such a distance.

The flimsy platform tied to the coral on the outer Great Barrier Reef where two marine scientists and I spent the night. It was here Captain Cook feared he “might be charged with timorousness because the seas broke very high”.

It was on the way back down the mountain that I got lost.

I kept coming to dead-ends and precipitous sheer drops down a rock-face ... each time having to back-track up again.

There was no one else on that mountain to ask the way.

The sun had set by the time I made it to the bottom. Exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, I lay down on sandy Watson’s Bay beach for a rest.

When I awoke it was night.

Wearing no watch, I had no idea what time it was.

I decided that the best and safest way back to the Scientific Station in the dark was via the wide, open airstrip that almost crossed the island.

This took me past Mrs Watson’s collapsing stone cottage with its air of facing death alone.

A century earlier, in 1881, while Mrs Watson’s husband was away fishing, a party of Aboriginal men arrived in the night, killed one of her Chinese servants and stabbed the other, Ah Sam.

After a four-day siege in the stone cottage, Mrs Watson fled with her seven-month-old baby, Ferrier, and the wounded Ah Sam. With no boat, they climbed into a small square iron tank and paddled out to sea.

Mrs Watson kept a diary of their five horrific days at sea before they all perished of thirst.

The last words she wrote were of her baby: “Ferrier near dead with thirst.”

There was a winding path off the airstrip that led through the bush to the Scientific Station. But, as I searched for it, all I found were spider-webs of spun steel and countless giant monitor lizards obviously looking for a feed.

These human-sized carnivorous reptiles are heavily-built, not scared of humans, and have a disturbing habit of standing up on their back legs like a dinosaur, to get a better look at you.

It reminded me of the way Australian tour boats teach crocodiles to leap so far out of a river that all four legs are visible.

I was aware too of the pythons and the venomous brown-headed snake that inhabit the island.

So I came up with a better idea.

I walked the length of the airstrip and headed off the end down to the coast to one of the 24 small sandy beaches that encircle the island.

I reasoned that, if I turned right when I hit the beach, the Scientific Station could be no more than a mile’s stroll along the white sand.

Lizard Island today. The air strip runs left to right, almost across the island. Behind it is the mountain, and bottom left the Resort. Foreground bottom right is the Scientific Station. I came down the mountain on the left-hand side, walked the length of Watson’s Bay (long beach centre left) then followed the airstrip to the ocean

How lovely it was to arrive on that little white beach on a clear night out in the open. No shadows stalking. No spiders spinning. No lizards leaping.

I could see the small uninhabitable island that was also visible from the Station.

I was on my way.

At the end of that nice beach, a rocky outcrop blocked the way, but I soon clambered over the large black rocks to another small sandy beach.

The trouble was that the next rocky outcrop was maybe 30-feet high.

Could I climb over it in the dark?

The only other possibility was to return to the bush … or enter the black swirling water.

So I climbed upwards. At the top of the pile I didn’t see a hole between the rocks because it was covered by debris which collapsed under my weight.

My right leg disappeared.

I quickly ripped it out, not knowing what might be living down there, and emerged limping and with a bleeding shin.

Still bleeding, days later I had a sleepless night on the frail platform over the ocean in the dark. One of the 8 guy-wires broke during the night

After crossing yet another private beach I groaned when I faced an even bigger rock pile in front of a vertical cliff-face.

Not wanting to go back over that previous barrier, I pushed on up. But this rock pile was so high that I only got around by clinging to grass and bushes growing out of the cliff face above the rocks.

I felt like The Man from Snowy River … but on a terrible ascent.  Where any slip was death.

After that experience I was sorely tempted to turn back, but couldn’t face the two dangerous climbs all over again.

The worst thing was that the small island opposite never seemed to move, no matter how far I travelled.

After another climb over rocks at the end of the next idyllic beach my legs had turned to jelly from the effort of climbing the mountain – and now this.

I was a desk-bound journalist, not a pioneer explorer!

It must have been near midnight, but I was surely getting closer to the Scientific Station?

At the next rockpile I couldn’t face another climb, and decided – in a weakened physical and mental state – to do what I should never have considered: enter the Barrier Reef waters in the dark when no one knew I was there.

I reasoned it wasn’t far around the rocks, as I could see over the ones in the water – perhaps only the length of a cricket pitch – so I wasn’t worried about sharks.

Just that I couldn’t see beneath the water.

Neck deep in the unlit ocean, I was pushed around by the water and cut on the rocks as I clung to them: not being much of a swimmer I didn’t want to lose contact with the precious hardness of land.

I was in over my head.

Then more rocks, and I emerged bleeding and exhausted and shaking, Robinson Crusoe-like, on a much longer white beach.

And there it was up ahead in the distance: the Scientific Station!

I’d never seen it lit up before – every lamp and spotlight was blazing. All lights in the house of the boss, Garry Goldman, were turned on – and yet so late at night?

Was it a party?

No. They were all out searching for me.

I saw them riding tractors with headlights on through the bush towards the mountain and yelling out to those who were already there.

When I staggered in, they said they assumed I had become lost up on the mountain.

They never imagined I was in the water.

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Next week: Lost in Noosa