As you near the end of the two hour, 600km small plane flight that brings you from Cairns to Haggerstone Island, it is hard to believe that you could possibly be this far north-east and still be in Australia. Behind you is the virtually uninhabited coast near the tip of Cape York and beneath you what looks like an aquatic moonscape: the deep darkness of the Coral Sea mottled by patches of cooler blue surrounding hundreds of shallow fudge-coloured reefs, yellow sand cays and lumps of jungly islands.
It was into this scene that Roy and Anna Turner sailed in 1985, never dreaming that the island home that they were about to build would one day become probably Australia’s most secluded resort. Nor could they have imagined back then that the very dramatic remoteness that had attracted them to Haggerstone Island would later prove to be its biggest drawcard.
Anna and Roy had met the previous year at a resort at Cape Tribulation further down the Queensland coast. Although Roy finds the comparisons odious, he was a Crocodile Dundee-like figure and she was a boarding school-educated English woman with an adventurous soul. Roy was developing a reputation as a self-taught builder and designer and although romance between them was slow-burning, Anna was immediately impressed when she saw the imagination that had gone into Roy’s self-built home in Cairns. “I thought it was the most beautiful house I had ever seen” she remembers.
Before long they were setting out on their journey together on Haggerstone, sustaining themselves on the previously uninhabited and occasionally harsh island by a combination of cray fishing and Roy’s other building projects. As they constructed what is now the resort’s Thai-style main building, they lived for years in tents. Sheer dedication and love also saw them overcome appalling hardships — Anna experiencing a miscarriage and Roy suffering a severe reaction to a jelly fish sting while diving — and a perhaps inevitable temporary split in the relationship. “The split was a turning point” comments Anna, “we both left and then I came back here on my own and had to do everything for a while and after that it took on a new interest. Then nearly a year later Roy came back.”
It was not until 1993, however, that they decided to open up their home to guests, adding three further wooden huts to the main building in order to accommodate a maximum of six to eight others.
Staying on Haggerstone you feel as if you have had the privilege of being invited into Roy and Anna’s living room. Literally, that living room is the resort’s main hut, much of it lovingly crafted out of soft-edged wood, its sides open to the delicious island breezes. Here driftwood is cleverly used to support heavy polished benches and every corner and cranny contains an eye-catching relic, from the husk of a canoe from Papua New Guinea through an ancient wooden dinner gong to a Balinese bed. It is also where guests congregate for meals, with the stone fire place on the front deck the focal point at night as meals of virtuosity and sublime freshness are prepared over the flames.
The rest of Roy and Anna’s tropical guest house comprises two further huts constructed in similar comfortable style to the main building and a more basic shack (with outdoor shower and throne room) behind its own patch of beach, which is easily the most oft-requested room.
Yet while the guest house is undeniably lovely, it is its backyard which makes the resort so unique. It begins with the soft contours of Haggerstone Island itself, where a symphony of bird song and of wind-rustled palm fronds, seems to play all day. Immediately surrounding Haggerstone, meanwhile, are warm waters which bubble with marine life. So much so that when you go swimming, you often have trumpet fish and families of harmless small shovel nosed sharks for company and that often what seems like a shallow reef is actually a shoal of minuscule sprats. Even more bountiful are the lagoons, reefs and open ocean that spread for hundreds of virtually untouched kilometres at one of the outer edges of the continent.
Haggerstone Island has come a long way since the Turners first arrived there nearly fifteen years ago with a barge full of possessions and building materials. The size and scale of what the Turners have created in the tropics is enormous. When you step onto the island you cannot help but sense the vision and hard graft it must have taken to have achieved all that and indeed to maintain it, even with the help of three full-time staff. After all, as Anna says, “you can’t just pick up the phone and call a plumber”.
While Haggerstone continues to develop and things have changed, the unspoilt essence of Haggerstone Island remains the same. “It’s the sort of place” as Anna puts it, “where you take off your watch and your shoes when you arrive and then don’t put them back on until you leave.”
Published under licence from Travel Intelligence
