If I can pick my island it will be one with a view of the mainland. Or another island, because that focal point has an effect on the imagination that an empty horizon cannot match. On Zanzibar, stay on the west coast for views of Africa as the explorer Sir Henry Stanley would have seen it. On Dominica, try Secret Bay for glimpses of mysterious Guadeloupe, and in Australia, pick Orpheus Island, lying inshore of the Great Barrier Reef and just ten miles from Queensland’s tropical shore.
Watching the distant lights come on after the sun has set over the volcanic hinterland of Far North Queensland somehow enhances the thrill of isolation, and despite its proximity to the mainland, Orpheus is remote. Brisbane, to the south, is further from here than Barcelona is from London, and the island is more than 1,000 miles from Sydney.
Swigging an Aussie rosé while swinging in a hammock as the sun lays a golden track across the Coral Sea, it’s easy to fantasise about wading ashore, pitching camp above the high water mark and cooking line-caught spangled emperor over a driftwood fire. But the all-inclusive Orpheus Island Resort makes it a lot easier than that.
You can come by boat on a three-hour voyage from Cairns or by helicopter on a 30-minute flight from Townsville. Whichever you choose, you’ll be greeted like a celebrity.
Cocktails, beer and South Australian fizz are on tap 24/7. Gourmet breakfasts, lunch and dinners are included. There’s an infinity pool over here, a gently shelving beach of coral sand over there and, behind, a steep spine of dense rainforest where sulphur-crested cockatoos have no respect for peace and quiet.
The 14 rooms and suites are separated into North Beachfront and South Beachfront sectors — the latter being quieter because it’s further away from the helipad. The rooms and suites are better in the South Beachfront sector too, as reflected in the price, with North Beachfront rooms and suites £200 and £300 cheaper per night respectively than the southern options. Southside suites comprise a private covered porch area, an open-plan bed/living room with massive TVs and a long bathroom opening to an outdoor shower.
But do you actually need a suite on a tropical island made for outdoor living? Will you ever turn on the massive TVs? Does the free premium booze taste better in a suite than in the standard room? Is the sea view more impressive from a more expensive room? And while there’s also a two-bedroom villa ideal for families, this doesn’t really feel like a family resort.
There are free-to-use kayaks, motor boats and catamarans, as well as paddleboards laid out on the beach beside the jetty. The snorkelling equipment is top quality — although you don’t need to get in the water to see the fins of the harmless black-tipped reef sharks zipping up and down the shoreline — and there’s a daily sunset cruise fully stocked with sundowners.
I’m up with the Torresian crows for a dawn hike into the rainforest. The island is seven miles long by just 1,600ft (480m) wide at the waist. The east coast, sheltered from the prevailing winds, is as arid as the Med, and from the top I can see eight other green outcrops, including Fantome Island — once home to a so-called lock hospital for the treatment of STIs, and a leper colony. Neither syphilis nor leprosy are currently present.
Beyond lies Palm Island — the former home of Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement. Families from 57 different language groups were forcibly transported here in the early 20th century, and tensions were so high that in 1999 Guinness World Records declared the island the most violent place on the planet outside of a warzone. That too has calmed down. To the west, Townsville on the mainland, and the Lucinda Jetty: 3.5 miles long and an engineering marvel built to load sugar on to ships.
To the north, Pelorus Island, and if Orpheus is a White Lotus, its ultra-exclusive little sister is Succession.
If you want to wish you’d worked harder at school and if Pelorus is unoccupied, you can visit. The boat drops you on a white beach on the western shore of a thousand-acre tropical paradise that’s uninhabited but for a five-suite designer lodge. There’s an art-filled lounge, a restaurant-quality kitchen, a private chef, a housekeeper and a Bond villain-style hangar packed with all the gadgets beloved of the playboys (except efoils, which are banned because the fins damage the coral). There’s also endless Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, but then there should be for £13,943 a night.
Oddly, Chris Morris, the owner of Orpheus and Pelorus — both of which were named after Royal Navy ships — didn’t work that hard at school. He admits he was a bit of a slacker until his mum signed him up for a computer course in Melbourne in 1966. In 1978 he launched a company called Computershare that turned him into a billionaire.
And despite his helicopters, casinos and superyachts, Morris seems to care about sustainability. At Orpheus, staff insist you take the backstage tour to look at the vegetable gardens, chicken coop and the solar batteries that power the resort. The diesel generators are only needed at night, but if guests could be persuaded to turn down the air con while they sleep, Orpheus could operate on solar power alone.
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I rely on paddle power alone to spend an afternoon kayaking around the island’s coast. Sheltered by fringing reefs, the water is deep blue, flat calm and crystal clear. Below me, coral trout, neon damsels, harlequin tuskfish, angels and butterflies drift between the coral heads, while a pair of forest kingfishers, dressed in maritime blue and white, hunt in the mangroves.
I land on an empty beach, as per my fantasy, then wade into the bath-warm sea for a snorkel. I see all of the above species in close-up, plus a stingray, two reef sharks and a grazing turtle — proof that you don’t need to be able to dive to see the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef.
But if you are a diver, Orpheus has world-class facilities. It can be a bumpy, 75-minute ride to Bramble (a good spot for giant clams), Rib or Walkers in the outer reefs, but once there you’ll have access to about 1,100 of the 1,500 species of fish on the reef and 340 of the 359 varieties of hard corals. Visibility is always a gamble: post-cyclone, the water was cloudy but I saw Spanish mackerel, huge Maori wrasse, lemon sharks and a distant turtle. Just don’t expect to meet any other commercial dive boats out there, and be prepared to see the damage wrought by rising sea temperatures, reduced salinity and storms.
Spend too long on the reef, though, and you may find you’ve missed something very cool back at the resort. A criticism of Orpheus is that there’s too much to do for the typical length of stay, so you might care to create a wish list before you arrive. Activities I missed include a fishing charter; a hike along croc-infested waterways to the waterfalls of Hinchinbrook Island; a private picnic on any beach I liked on the neighbouring islands; a tour of the ruins on Fantome Island; a cocktail class; and a full body exfoliation and thermal mud wrap in the day spa.
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I tried not to miss meals, though. Breakfast here is driven by fresh sourdough and the obsession with talking about coffee that Australia really needs to let go. The eggs are from the chicken coop in the back of house, the mangoes, when in season, from up the hill. The avo on toast — another Aussie fixation — comes with green hummus, poached egg, halloumi, spiced nuts and seeds.
Lunch is from around the world, with Singaporean, Japanese, Lebanese or Mexican dishes featuring on different days, but dinner is where Orpheus really lets loose. You’ll find a personalised menu in your room at sunset. If you’ve caught a fish, the chef Josh Childs, who worked with Nathan Outlaw, will cook it for you.
I’d caught only a tan, so I dined on mud crab with fermented chilli and a doughnut; barramundi on a macadamia cream with a citrus kosho — a spicy paste; and barbecued quail with yoghurt and cardamon.
It wasn’t bad for an all-inclusive, and if you seek the private dining experience, linger over cocktails at the bar: Australians eat early and they’ll be off to bed by 8.30pm.
They missed the late-night thunderstorm over the mainland, so I watched the lightning show alone. It felt like I was the only human on Orpheus.
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Chris Haslam was a guest of Queensland (queensland.com) and Orpheus Island, which has all-inclusive doubles from £874 (orpheus.com.au). Fly to Townsville, via Brisbane.
Steppes Travel has 14 nights’ B&B from £14,095pp staying at the Capella in Sydney, Sails in the Desert at Uluru and Orpheus Island Lodge on the Great Barrier Reef, including activities, some extra meals, transfers and internal flights (steppestravel.com)
Great Barrier Reef: what you need to know
What’s up with the reef?
At 1,429 miles long, comprising more than 3,000 individual reefs and coral cays, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef seems too big to fail. But having survived the past 500,000 years, the largest living structure on the planet is fast succumbing to the effects of climate change. A short dive on Bramble Reef is enough to see a bleached-white wall of once-kaleidoscopic coral devoid of marine life, but you don’t even need to go that far. In Pioneer Bay, just off the James Cook University (JCU) Research Station on Orpheus Island, 3,000 giant clams died after a single extreme weather event in February.
What’s the problem?
Professor Morgan Pratchett is a marine conservation ecologist at JCU specialising in coral reefs. He identifies warming seas, rising ocean acidification, more frequent and intense cyclones and reduced salinity due to rainwater run-off along the Australia coast as the critical climate-related threats to the ecosystem.
Doesn’t coral grow back?
Recent reports of coral cover reaching an all-time high on the reef should be taken with a pinch of salt. “All the recovery has been from weedy species which are really vulnerable to future disturbances,” Pratchett says. “Across the entire Great Barrier Reef we’ve lost 50 per cent of the coral and die-offs such as these have massive ramifications for the biodiversity of the reefs. We’ve got to get serious about reducing emissions so we can avoid the more catastrophic impacts of climate change, not just on the reef, but across all ecosystems.”
Can reefs be saved?
There are glimmers of hope. Dr Glen Burns is a marine biologist from Port Douglas in Far North Queensland. He’s identified two possible fixes for the Great Barrier Reef. The first involves scooping coral spawn from the surface above healthy reefs and dropping it over dead zones. The second is more complicated.
Coral gets its colours from the symbiotic algae living within its structure. Warming seas, acidification or decreasing salinity cause these microorganisms to leave their host, resulting in so-called bleaching. The coral is still alive, but at significant risk of starvation and death.
But researchers have discovered a heat-tolerant strain of algae called durusdinium. Drop that on to the reefs, Burns says, and you could stop bleaching.
It sounds simple, but there’s a problem of scale when it comes to identifying die-offs and reseeding in an area 1.5 times that of the British Isles.
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Should I go?
Tourism operators are critical to the monitoring of the ecosystem, with the Eye on the Reef programme allowing tourist boats to provide near real-time health information to scientists (eotr.gbrmpa.gov.au). Tourists only visit about seven per cent of the Great Barrier Reef and scientists say that as long as you travel with a responsible local operator, the value of bearing witness to the challenges far outweighs any detrimental effects. Find officially approved operators at gbrmpa.gov.au.
Three more private islands to rent in Australia
By Richard Mellor
Camp Island Lodge, Queensland
Camp Island is a 24-hectare playground in the Great Barrier Reef’s winsome Whitsundays chain. Whether booking one or all of its four stilted, hardwood bungalows — which share a kitchen and sunset-facing lounge — you’ll have it all to yourself. A private chef can be ordered, or daily barbecue provisions sent over by boat. Activities-wise you can look for eagles and wallabies on bumpy walking trails up the lone hill, play tennis, lounge on a white-sand beach, use the four-person motorboat or capitalise on surrounding coral reefs. Snorkelling equipment is provided, as are paddleboards, while between July and October you might see humpback whales.
Details Three nights’ self-catering for eight from £4,002, including boat transfers (campisland.com.au). Fly to Proserpine
Satellite Island, Tasmania
Absent on Satellite Island: other people, wi-fi and any hint of fawning. Instead delivering soulful, slow-travel holidays, this 30-hectare speck — five minutes from Bruny Island, south of the island of Tasmania — is a place where guests take bracing dips, prise oysters off rocks, kayak, fossil-hunt and follow bush paths in search of the resident deer and white-breasted sea eagles. Clad in timber, the two large cabins sleep eight in total; both mix antiques with sun-bleached driftwood but only the Boathouse has roller doors so that you can sleep alfresco. Uphill, chickens supply fresh eggs and there’s a Japanese-style onsen bath for 38C soaks.
Details Two nights’ self-catering for eight from £5,975 (satelliteisland.com.au). Fly to Hobart
Haggerstone Island Resort, Queensland
Far from anywhere off northern Queensland’s wild Cape York peninsula — Papua New Guinea is closer than Cairns, the nearest city — the 42-hectare Haggerstone is far more of a sybarite’s playground. That’s confirmed by the helicopter on standby for waterfall-hopping journeys around the mainland and the skippered, 45ft jet boat ready to plonk you on empty Barrier Reef sandbars. Up to a dozen guests can stay, sharing the safari-style three-bedroom villa and a trio of open-plan beach huts. From jet-skiing jaunts down to meals, everything is tailored to your preference.
Details Four nights’ full board from £2,229pp, including activities and laundry (haggerstoneisland.com.au). Fly to Cairns
