Rainbow Beach is a tiny one street seaside resort which is used, along with Hervey Bay, as a ferry point to get to Fraser Island a beautiful Island famous for being the biggest sand island in the world.

The Island was originaly named Great Sandy Island by captain Cook but it was later renamed Fraser Island after a woman called Eliza Fraser. In a nutshell, a boat got into trouble near Fraser island and whilst the rest of the crew went to the mainland Captain Fraser and hs wife Eliza decided to head for the nearby island. This however turned out to be a bad move - they bumped into aborigine tribe no. 1 who stole their belongings and then into tribe no. 2 who stole their clothes and enslaved them. The Captain naturally wasn't very happy with this arrangement and refused to carry out the tasks he was set which resulted in him receiving an oboriginal form of punishment, a knife wound to the shoulder. Now in normal circumstances this wouldn't cause much injury but unfortunately, in the poor Captains case, it resulted in his death. Eliza, now alone, managed to escape to the mainland where she recuperated for a while before eventually returning to the UK. On her return she became a bit of a celebrity and did the rounds lecturing on how she had been captured and lived with an aborigine tribe. As she and her story telling brought such notoriety to the island the Australians decided to reward her by naming the island after her!

The aborigine communties were herded off the island in the 1940's to live in the dreaded missionaries, though one tribe does now live back on the island. Once the aborigines were removed the island became the domain of the 'loggers' but again change was to come because when the island gained world heritage ranking these too were kicked off Fraser. It gained world heritage status as it is the world's largest sand island, has a natural water table which can go as high as 7 metres above sea level which means that instead of desert it has a rich inland rainforest.

You can see Fraser Island either in a self driven 4x4 with 10 other people or through a guided tour. I opted for the latter as I'd heard a number of horror stories about the self driven tours and they have to camp on the beach with the dingos and you know how much I love dogs/dingos! Instead I went with 13 people on a specially constructed roomy bus and stayed in a hostel complete with dingo fence - bliss!

We had a really good crack on the island and I met some really lovely people - in particular Cheryl, Angie and Eva (from Bermuda no less). We visited lots of sand dunes, sand blows and natural lakes - take a look at the photos to see.

There is a shipwreck on 75 mile beach but it is decomposing very quickly at the moment. The ship, the Maheno, was a luxury steam liner ferrying passengers between New Zealand and Australia, though it did have a break during WW1 to transport soldiers between France and England. When it was eventually decommissioned the Japanese bought it and decided that the best way to get it back to Japan would be to remove it's propellors and to tow it back but unfortunately a storm erupted and the rope between the 2 ships broke resulting in the liner being grounded on the beach. The liner landed on Fraser Island just as it had the day it was decommissioned complete even with a grand piano on board and it never moved from that day!.