Blog

Stradbroke Island

©Kara Rosenlund

Before Christmas Timothy O and I set off on a little ‘pre’ Christmas holiday…. just a quick dash away… we had hoped to take Frankie our caravan away, though we had let it go too late to get an available site at most caravan parks….~~its competitive you know, ha~~ instead we thought ‘where else can we get that old school easy summer holiday vibe by the sea’..…. Hello Stradbroke Island….

… I must admit I haven’t spent too much time on Straddie… the last time I visited was about ten years ago when I was photographing cricketer Matthew Hayden at his holiday house… so the thought of going somewhere ‘new’ which wasn’t really that far was rather exciting…

… I even found the 45 minute barge ride over to Straddie from Cleveland exciting…. looking out onto the bay….

… from the moment we arrived there was such positive energy everywhere…. friends, cousins, parents, kids, all enjoying each others company and sharing the best of the outdoors together…. it literally felt like we had gone back in time….

… I just couldn’t get over the sheer natural beauty of the island… ~~um,why hadn’t we come over before this?…~~ Timothy O and I had a long swim here at Amity Point in the turquoise water and washed all traces of the city off our skin…

… we then set off to explore the island, picking up some local seafood along the way…

… we came across this beach and made ourselves right at home on the sand….

… isolated… in the best sort of way…

… I forgot to pack the beach umbrella, so we made do with an old favourite hemp blanket of mine… this old thing doubles or rather triples as a sheet for the bed, a picnic blanket for the park and a tablecloth for entertaining… and now a beach canopy…

… and this was us for the next few hours… just like this… how ridiculously lucky…

… the perseverance of nature… beautiful little balls of sand made by sand crabs; filtering the wet sand looking for food…

… all along the beaches are these ghostly trees… so rugged…

… early dinner in the sand…. seafood always tastes better when you can see the ocean doesn’t it….

…. and then the sun went down…

… bright and early the next day we headed to Point Lookout to see what has happening there…

… more of the good life…

… we came across this too cute for words ‘Prawn Shack’…. love it’s simplicity..

… and fell head over heels in love with the sweet sign writing and colour scheme….

… Trumans … an independent health food / general store….

… the island is dotted with such quirky charms…. like this weathered pair of old plastic chairs… concreted into the cement….. perhaps two old friends like to fish off this cliff together… ~~and don’t like to bring along their own chairs, ha~~