Syrup, hot damper and sapotes: Maggie is her name

We were so close to Magnetic Island and the ferry so convenient, we ending up hopping aboard as walkers, leaving our motorhome in a carpark for the night, taking a wee trip across and around the island. How lovely that turned out to be.

Our Bed and Breakfast host collected us from the ferry and gave us an unexpected guided tour of the island’s more remote highlights, and had Bec busy feeding rock wallabies in secluded headlands, then hunting down sleeping koalas in tall eucalyptus trees.

Our home for the night, lit with fairy lights, was surrounded by a shady tropical jungle, that the owners had planted from scratch when they retired here from Mt Isa, the cool so inviting to so many different birds it was like living in a leafy atrium: we recognised cockatoos, lorikeets, and the nighttime squeal of the curlews.

Our hosts offered us the use of one of their cars for our stay, so we were able to hunt down the island’s only museum and its first school which is now heritage listed, both brilliantly organised and maintained by a busy band of willing and informative volunteers.

We tracked down an exhibition by the local nature photographer and fell in love with her jumping frog stuck on a fern image which enticed us so much we are now sorry we didn’t buy it. Next time.

And we completely fell in love with the colours of the island. Some places in the world somehow reflect light in such a way that colour appears brighter, bluer, sharper: like, Santorini, parts of Provence, and Magnetic Island. Everything seems to glow blue on blue, gilded, really inviting photographs, so we spent much of our time moving from one beautiful bay to another until late evening trying to capture it all.

The morning before we caught our ferry back we discovered a magical Butterfly forest walk where every tree had almost as many butterflies on it as leaves: all variations on the Monarch. Just beautiful.

"Maggie" one of the locals affectionately calls his island when he loves her, he told us. And "that bloody rock" when he doesn't. For us, she was Maggie.