Nature�s masterpiece
Whitsunday Island, Queensland- Australia
The five kilometre scimitar of pure white sand that is Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island National Park has been described as a �silica masterpiece�. The beach is populated mostly by turtles, gulls, dolphins and swifts. It�s the sort of place from which literature is wrought be it Mills and Boon or Robinson Crusoe. Here you can swim in sky-blue waters, or wan�der for hours down the beach�s pearly curve until you come upon a stream from which you�ll swear you�re the first person to ever drink. You�re not: Captain James Cook sighted and named this island in 1770 � and he was still millennia behind the mainland aborigines.
Whitsunday�s natural history is re�corded in its complex ecology of man�groves, reefs and rainforest � little has actually been written of the human events that have occured here. In 1878 a ship called the Louise Marie put ashore for wa�ter, but was attacked and burned by na�tive people. The cook was lost and, it is said, eaten. A decade later, John Withnall and his family settled at Cid Harbour on the eastern side of the island and founded a sawmill which employed many Aborigi�nes, including the alleged consumer of the Louise Marie�s cook.
These days you can camp beneath the magnificent oaks of Whitehaven Beach and not worry about such events, or much else at all.
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