A courtesy bus (daily 9.15am) leaves from the McCafferty’s bay on the third floor of the Roma Street Transit Centre. The alternatives are to take the similarly priced Moreton Venture (tel 07/3895 1000), also to Tangalooma, or the Combie Trader barge and vehicle transport to Bulwer (tel 07/3203 6399) – call for timetables and departure points.
Four-wheel-drive tours organized by Combie Trader and Sunrover Expeditions (tel 07/3203 4241) last from one to three days. Taking your own vehicle to the island, whose sand tracks are 4WD-only, will cost at least $150 return. The rules of the road are the same as on the mainland; check tide times before driving on the beach, and be aware that pedestrians may not hear you above the sound of the surf.
Supplies on the island are expensive and limited to Bulwer and Kooringal, so you need to be self-sufficient and have enough water if you are camping. There are no banks. And before you go in the water, remember that the beaches aren’t patrolled and there are no shark nets. The worst times to visit are at Christmas and Easter, when up to a thousand vehicles crowd onto the island all at once.
The island has designated campsites at Tangalooma and Ben-Ewa (3km towards Bulwer) on the west coast and Blue Lagoon and Eagers Creek on the east side, you can camp anywhere along beaches except where there are signs asking you not to. Permits are available from barge operators or on site for $3.50 per person per night.
Around the island
Nearby is Tongalooma Wild Dolphin Resort which has parts of a former whaling station incorporated into its buildings. Pleasantly shaded and busy at weekends and holidays, it’s the only place on the island that has a restaurant and serves cold drinks – respectable dress required. There’s also a national parks campsite here (with water, showers and toilets), which gets as crowded as anywhere on the island. A three-kilometre track heads south from Tangalooma to the Desert, where the dunes are a great place to try sand-tobogganing.
With your own vehicle, or if you don’t mind hiking, take the ten-kilometre track from Tangalooma across to Moreton’s more attractive eastern side; generally less crowded, the beach also has good surf. You end up at Eagers Creek, where there’s another campsite and a five-kilometre return trip up Mount Tempest’s 280-metre peak – an exhausting climb. Head 10km north up the beach, and you’ll find Blue Lagoon, the largest of the island’s freshwater lakes, only 500m from the beach and adjacent to the smaller, picturesque Honeyeater Lake. Blessed with shady trees, the dunes behind the beach make an ideal place to camp, and the site is supplied with water, showers and toilets. Dolphins come in close to shore – a practice that Moreton’s Aborigines turned to their advantage by using them to chase fish into the shallows. Writing in the 1870s about his life in Brisbane, Tom Petrie reported that the Ngugi men would beat the surf with their spears, and:
By and by, as in response, porpoises would be seen as they rose to the surface making for the shore and in front of them schools of tailor fish. It may seem wonderful, but they were apparently driving the fish towards the land. When they came near, [they] would run out into the surf, and with their spears would jab down here and there at the fish, at times even getting two on one spear, so plentiful were they.
Moreton’s northern end is about 9km wide, covered in ferns, grasstrees, paperbark and banksias around the shore, and dense scrub inland. The landing point here is BULWER, a cluster of weatherboard “weekenders” and a store stocking fuel and beer and providing basic accommodation in six-person units.
The beach is the only “road” south to Tangalooma, while vehicle tracks cut across to Honeyeater Lake and to the island’s northeastern corner, North Point, where adjacent dunes form near-vertical cliffs, and fresh water, brown with tannin, seeps out into lagoons. Around from North Point, rocky Cape Moreton is capped by a red-and-white lighthouse, built between 1857 and 1928 and still operating. There’s a museum in the house below and fine views down the east coast from adjacent cliffs.
The south end of the island mostly consists of exposed dunes, some covered in scrub and others forming white “blows”, which are destabilized, shifting hills that slowly roll over forests. Right at Moreton’s southern tip, KOORINGAL is a sleepy version of Bulwer and has a store offering fuel, supplies and drinks from their bar (tel 07/3409 0170; open daily 8am–midnight), as well as holiday units that sleep up to six (tel 07/3409 0298 or tel 3409 0105; $75 and over). From Kooringal, diversions include the twelve-kilometre return trip to Big and Little Sandhills via Toompani beach and eerie, long-dead stands of trees in the wake of the dunes. Take plenty of water.
There’s decent diving around the deepest points of Tangalooma’s wrecks, but Curtain Reef is superior: an artificial conglomeration of barges, tugs, cars and tyres encrusted with shells, it attracts all types of marine life including sharks, dolphins, groupers and huge rays.
Maps
