Tracks of our years: the soundtrack to a family ritual

In 2000, when my son Nick was in his 20s, he gave me a music compilation he’d recorded and labelled “Moreton Mix”. It opened with Avalon, Roxy Music’s sinuous ode to the enchanted island from Arthurian legend, where Excalibur was forged and King Arthur was taken to recover from battle injuries. It was the track we always played at full blast when the kids were young and we drove off the vehicle barge at Moreton Island, our family’s own curative hideaway near Brisbane.

The island worked its magic on our kids in ways we didn’t recognise until their teens.Credit: Getty Images

Back then, in the early 1980s, we knew nothing of the inspiration behind Bryan Ferry’s latest hit, only that, in some emotionally charged way, it suited Moreton’s wild and beautiful topography. As we rolled along the icing-sugar beach, camping gear piled atop the four-wheel drive, the colours of everything around us – turquoise sea, cobalt sky, verdant bush – always seemed sharper and more intense than anywhere else, as though light itself became more focused here.

“Yes the picture’s changing, every mo-oo-ment,” hollered Nick and our daughter, Lou, bopping along with Bryan, “And your destination, you don’t kno-oow it … Avalon.”

We camped on the island’s north-western tip, where the waters of Moreton Bay surge past a series of sandy points whose dimensions change with almost every tidal cycle. (Like other sand islands off south-east Queensland, Moreton – or Mulgumpin, as it’s known to its traditional owners, the Quandamooka people – is an ongoing natural phenomenon, formed over countless years by siliceous sand borne by waves and currents from the far south of Australia’s east coast.)

From our old marquee, pitched in a clearing amid flowering banksias and scribbly gum, we watched dolphins and dugong feed and play near the shoreline. Further out, beyond the translucent shallows, school fish attended by swooping seabirds churned white circles across the darker depths.

For a decade or so, we spent almost every holiday here: swimming, fishing, digging pipis and exploring sandy tracks and freshwater lakes from one end of the 40-kilometre long island to the other. We topped up on supplies at several tiny freehold settlements – accessible, like everywhere else on the road-free island, only via 4WD along beaches two hours either side of high tide.

In those days, Moreton was rarely visited, except by fishing groups and bushwalkers. It was mostly national park, yet we rarely saw a ranger, and the rules and regulations necessary to protect its complex ecology from increased tourism weren’t enforced until years later. Brumbies (since removed to protect dune vegetation) still roamed the wilderness, as they had for generations. Social groups of them would come to our campsite snorting for snacks; sometimes, in the dead of night, the same vagabonds thundered past along the tide line, bent upon “urgent missions” the children liked to invent.

The island worked its magic on Lou and Nick in ways we didn’t recognise until, at some stage in their teens, it became more their place than ours. They began making their own trips there with schoolmates, trekking with surfboards and tents and backpacks containing at least one Roxy Music tape. Their early adventures, set about an area known as Joint Point, were full of terrible stuff-ups – missed barges, forgotten supplies, gashed limbs, bungled rendezvous – yet they always described these disasters with evangelical enthusiasm. Perhaps, we sniggered at the time, the island’s magic made memories of pleasure and pain indistinguishable.

At the end of year 12, Nick was lucky to survive an accident in a car driven by a schoolmate. As soon as he got out of hospital, eyes still blackened and head bandaged, he packed a tent and went to Moreton to finish healing. Soon afterwards, he deferred university and got a live-in job as a general dogsbody at Tangalooma, the island’s only resort, escaping in his off-time to remote spots where tourists had yet to venture.

For days after they get home their kids’ faces stay bright with memories of things words still can’t quite capture.

For generations of modern Moreton lovers, it was this idea of secret places – an inaccessible beach, a mangrove crabbing haven, a sweet-tasting spring emerging from deep below a fauna-rich melaleuca swamp – that made it feel special, unknown to all but a few kindred souls. But by the mid-1990s, when our kids were off on separate explorations in Europe, Moreton’s long-anticipated tourism boom had begun.

Over ensuing years, the resort expanded hugely. Camping and beach-driving fees were introduced, barges from Brisbane became bigger and faster, warning signs sprang up, police and park rangers became live-in, and people preceded by wheeled suitcases breezed in for weekends, later announcing their “discovery” of Moreton in irritating travelogues that never mentioned Avalon or King f…ing Arthur!

In better news, future management of the island’s non-freehold areas will be shared by the Queensland Government and the Quandamooka, whose relationship with Mulgumpin predates white settlement (and Arthurian legend) by thousands of years. Even after the introduction of the island’s jarringly Trumpian new tourism slogan – “Escape the Fake” – Nick and Lou, now with young families of their own, still go there regularly. They still play Roxy Music full-bore as they roll off the barge, and for days after they get home their kids’ faces stay bright with memories of things words still can’t quite capture.

“Much communication, in a motion. Without conversation, or a notion … Avalon.”

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