The sage of Stradbroke island

ON North Stradbroke Island, you learn to appreciate the simple things.

stradbroke island

I WAS searching for the Table of Knowledge, a mythic picnic table set on the rise of Point Lookout, North Stradbroke Island, boasting glimpses to the Coral Sea and the meaning of life.

It's where seven or eight local Straddie men gather daily at sunset to sip beers and unravel the mysteries of the universe: Who am I? Why am I here? How do you remove club soda stains?

"Barefoot" Dave Thelander told me about it. He said he sat there some afternoons with some of the island's other shoeless sages, thinkin' and drinkin'. It is said that he who sits at the Table of Knowledge will be blessed with profound thought and insight, and maybe the occasional Champion Ruby roll-your-own.

Barefoot Dave doesn't do shoes but he does do tours. It was about four hours into one of Barefoot Dave's 4WD tours through glorious Stradbroke Island - the world's second-largest sand island, a 40-minute ferry ride across Moreton Bay from east Brisbane - that I first realised the depth of the leather-skinned, award-winning fisherman's thinking.

We were eating barbecued sausages and coleslaw in Dave's "outdoor restaurant" on Flinders Beach, on the Coral Sea side of Straddie. Dave's restaurant is wherever he stops his car and sets up a portable barbecue, dinner table and two folding chairs on the beach's pristine 4.6km stretch of loose white sand. "Let me show you something," he said.

From a box of tools and cooking implements, Dave pulled out a sealed plastic bag containing one of his most treasured possessions: a single white clothes peg. "This fella's been with me for 12 years," he said. The peg was worn away on one end through over use, its white plastic chassis sun-perished and chalky. The peg, Barefoot Dave explained, had given him 12 years of faithful service: pegging down wind breaks in blustery beach days, sealing bags of leftover snags. He loved that peg. I thought for a moment he was sharing a parable on loyalty, devotion and finding friendship in unexpected places. He let me touch it. "Give it a squeeze," he said proudly. It was so astonishingly, overwhelmingly peg-like. Dave said he would like nothing more in this world than for someone to create a museum exhibit dedicated to the evolution of the clothes peg.

Dave showed me many things: how he'd used an apple to subdue the island brumbies of his youth; how the beautiful foxtail tree hides away deep in the forest in the island's centre; why he doesn't mind feeding his homemade damper to the ducks on Brown Lake because we human swimmers have scared away their natural food source. Then he spoke at length about the invention of the electric toothbrush. I knew there was profound subtext to his talk but I was just too darned clouded, too darned city, to know what it was.

Barefoot Dave dropped me back at our beach house on Point Lookout. We were staying in Aquila, a three-level wonder of beachside design, an architectural marvel that towers over a treed landscape to stare out over the ocean. The beach house living room was the size of a tennis court, filled with natural light from a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. A zig-zagging internal staircase rose to a rooftop terrace and a whale-watching tower where guests can gaze in wonder at the humpback highway below. When he saw the house, Dave gave a look of approval that suggested he didn't mind the place at all but he'd reserve full verbal judgment until he viewed the downstairs peg basket.

We shook hands and he told me where to get the best Spanish mackerel on the island. That was from the downstairs freezer of a woman's house one block back from the beach. The woman - the wife of a gifted Straddie fisherman - ran a fresh fish business out of what appeared to be once her rumpus room. "Barefoot Dave sent me," I said. The woman laughed. "I just call him Dave," she said, handing me half a Spanish mackerel so fresh that, by the sizzling beach-house barbie that night, I swore I heard a squeaky little voice asking, "Whyyyyyy?"

The next morning, at sunrise, I set off on one of those last-night's-boozy-dinner-compensation jogs favoured by 33-year-old men fearful of inheriting their father's chicken-legged, beer-bellied frame. The jog started at the island's South Gorge beach, a family swimming beach protected by two rock walls that create gentle and perfect waves that don't break so much as whimper out. The scene at South Gorge is perennially beautiful. It's Queensland's greatest secret, a slice of the Amalfi Coast on an island 40 minutes from the people of South-East Queensland, an estimated 75 per cent of whom have never seen it.

I jogged down to the island's endless and empty Main Beach, where a long-dead and extremely large beached whale had been rotting for days on the shoreline. That beautiful creature was majestic even in death. From June to November as many as 10,000 humpback whales can pass Stradbroke Island's North Gorge headland on an annual migration from Antarctica to the Great Barrier Reef. To see a humpback whale breach off Point Lookout, Barefoot Dave said, is something that makes the heart soar. To see a humpback whale dead on the beach breaks it. "Sometimes they just die of old age," he said. "Everybody's gotta go some time." There sure are worse places in the world to rest your head one last time.

I spluttered and panted to the tourist track that winds around the cavernous and thunderous North Gorge. Past Fishes Cafe - battered fish and chips so good you'll weep. Past the gelati shop - honeycomb ice cream so good you'll weep. Past glass-topped Frenchmans Bay and the caravan park clans on Cylinder Beach and then back up, pilgrimage-style, to the Table of Knowledge. I sat down and sucked air into my battle-stationed lungs and drank in the morning sunrise, all that orange and pink sky over a moody purple sea stirring and plotting with the temperament of a Russian chess master. Beach sunrises always make me gutter-talk: "You are so f..king lucky to be alive."

Then it hit me. Barefoot Dave's lesson, I realised, sitting there alone and without prior approval on the hallowed Table of Knowledge, was one of appreciation. Barefoot Dave appreciates that clothes peg, that titan of simplicity, that long-unheralded feat of engineering. He appreciates every last plant, strip of bark, hidden spider, fallen leaf, sloping dune and pristine lake on this island.

I appreciate Kathy Hart, the mother of my best mate from school. She was the orange Ford Meteor-driving feat of genetic engineering who found a space in her voluminous heart to let me tag along on Hart family trips to Stradbroke Island. She gave me this island as a boy and I kept it in my veins. Camping on the beach at Amity Point. Pumping for yabbies. Sneaking swigs from some bloke's Fruity Lexia. Rolling down sand dunes. Backflipping through all that skin-nourishing tea tree oil in Brown Lake. Digging for pippies on Main Beach. One day we were fishing when some kids flipped their tinny out at sea off Amity Point. We swam out and rescued them, dog-paddled them back to shore. These were magic days. I always thought the Nunukul people somewhat downplayed the wonders of Straddie. "Minjerribah" they called it. Place of mosquitoes. This is a place of memory.

Why am I here? Why was I there? To swim with my kids. To show them how to lift the nose of a bodyboard so you don't duck-dive into sand. To show them how to fortify a moat around a sandcastle Camelot. To show them how to sink your feet into the sand on a shoreline and make your toes feel around for pippies. To go back to the beach house and shovel down a fresh piece of bread with butter and Vegemite. To go out the back and hang up the kids' togs on a stretch of rope, fastening those drippy swimsuits in place under the sun with two clothes pegs. Old-school pegs, wooden with no metal springs, just a thin and empty shaft in a stick of wood with a ball head, perfectly mundane and wondrous, like the very best beach holiday.

A seven-night stay in Aquila starts at $1600, including ferry (discoverstradbroke.com.au; 07 3415 3949). A return car ferry trip costs $146 (stradbrokeferries.com.au). Barefoot Dave's Straddie Kingfisher Tours start at $60 (07 3409 9502).