Harry’s Hut

Our original plan had been to drive straight from the Gold Coast to Fraser Island. However, we decided that was a bit far for one day and our friends had decided to go to Australia Zoo for a day (which we weren’t interested in), so we looked for a stopover closer to Fraser Island. We found Harry’s Hut, which is on the banks of the Noosa River in the Great Sandy NP, just a little south of Inskip Point where we needed to catch the barge over to Fraser Island.

We had a slow morning in the caravan park on the Gold Coast then finally headed off to do some shopping, which always seems to take much longer than it should and resulted in us having lunch in the Woolworths carpark. Anyway the result was that we finally got to camp after dark (again!).

The next morning we had a lazy morning in camp, cooking pancakes catching up on our journals and exploring the area a little. We’d got a message that Lesley had woken up sick so they were going to be running later than expected, which allowed us some extra time.

Overnight we could hear plenty of owls calling in the night and swooping overhead and I even almost hit one as we were driving in. The next morning the owls were gone but they were replaced by plenty of other birdlife and the kids enjoyed watching them play around the camp.

The camp was a beautiful and surprisingly busy spot. It seems to be both a popular day trip from Noosa and a big canoeing area. The river was lovely and still and looked very inviting, although the numerous warning signs about sharks being common weren’t so inviting.

The hut itself is an old hut used by loggers. It’s on the site where logs had to be winched across the river so the workers would live in the hut. When logging stopped it was apparently bought by the local pharmacist, Harry, who then brought his family up to camp in it for holidays.

Finally we thought we’d better go. The drive out was a lovely drive through rainforest and there were plenty of photo spots.

We made our way out on a 4WD track to Rainbow Beach just in time to meet Russell and Lesley coming up from Australia Zoo. Then it was a late lunch and onto the barge to Fraser Island.