NARRATOR: Australia's Fraser Island
is a paradise built entirely on sand,
a paradise that includes
every kind of wild environment.
But it's also where dingoes and humans risk danger,
developing a damaged relationship
at the water's edge.
Beaches break free from the coast
to become roaming sand dunes,
consuming everything in their path.
Rainforest trees make their roots in sand,
yet still rise to record-setting heights.
And crustacean armies can materialize
like an unending, intertidal magic trick
on The Living Beach.
NARRATOR: This is the wreckage of the S.S. Maheno,
and the growing beach that is burying its rusting steel.
Built as a luxury passenger ship,
and then used as a hospital vessel
during the First World War,
the Maheno was caught in a cyclone
off the coast of Queensland, Australia in 1935.
Finally beaching here,
on a lonely stretch of Fraser Island's
long eastern shore.
In her day, the Maheno was 5000 tons,
400 feet long and 50 feet wide,
capable of carrying hundreds of passengers.
Now, most of what remains of her
hides buried beneath these sands.
Ninety-nine years before the Maheno,
it was an earlier shipwreck
that gave Fraser Island its name.
Eliza Fraser arrived at these same beaches in a lifeboat,
after her husband's ship was destroyed
on the Great Barrier Reef.
Fraser's survival story
so captured the Colonial imagination
that this entire place now bears her name.
but for the Aboriginal people here before her,
the island will always be "K'gari"
meaning "Paradise".
It is a paradise built upon sand.
This entire island is one single sandmass,
the largest of its kind in the world.
But being built on sand
doesn't limit its varied environments.
CONROY: The thing about Fraser Island,
is it contains a bit of everything.
In such a small area,
you've got a hundred kilometer island,
quite a thin strip,
you've got an amazing array of vegetation type.
So you've got the Coastal Wallum Heathland,
you've got open grasslands,
you've got closed heathland,
you've got open woodlands,
right through to rainforest.
That's the thing that sometimes
you need to remind yourself
that it's all sitting there on sand.
NARRATOR: Fraser Island is located
directly off the east coast of Queensland,
separated from the Australian continent
by the Great Sandy Strait.
This strait is a narrow, sand-passage estuary
that, at one point,
would have connected Fraser Island to Australia.
SINCLAIR: Even when Fraser Island was part of the mainland,
it was still a huge
mountain range of sand,
and then when the sea levels rose up
to their current level it became an island.
NARRATOR: The grains of sand making up Fraser Island
arrive here on the tides.
And those sand grains
are broken-down bits of rock
from Australia's mainland.
The volume of sand here is more than any desert.
Deserts are just a sheet of sand
layered over foundational rock
While at Fraser Island,
the sand runs incredibly deep.
SINCLAIR: You have to dig down here several meters,
and in places hundreds of meters,
before you actually reach bedrock.
NARRATOR: Fraser Island has been called
"the Great Barrier Reef of sand masses".
Since 1992,
it's been a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
protected for its outstanding universal value.
Sand is relatively nutrient-poor
but this sand island supports
an incredible number of plants and animals.
The process allowing this to happen
starts with every individual grain.
MEYER: On the eastern beach you'll find the sand there
is an orangey browny yellow color.
On the west coast, you'll find the sand there is white.
White sand is very old sand, usually.
It's a bit like hair.
The older it gets, the whiter it becomes, right?
So the orange sand is exactly the same sand
as the white sand,
it just has a very fine mineral coating.
Two or three percent of it are minerals,
that's what allows all of Fraser Island to exist.
If it didn't have that mineral coating
you would never have had the first plant
being able to grow on the island,
because that's the first food
for the first plant to start growing.
Everything is interconnected,
and I like the idea of that.
NARRATOR: Where the S.S. Maheno remains lodged in sand,
and Eliza Fraser would have first arrived in her lifeboat,
is the younger Eastern Shore.
It's dominated by the coastal straightaway
known as 75 Mile Beach.
On this protected island,
it's a compromise that this beach also functions
as a highway for off-roading vehicles,
one of the complexities
of welcoming huge numbers of eco-tourists every year.
Another complexity here
is the relationship between tourists
and the island's most famous species.
The dingo.
The dingo is an apex predator,
at the top of the local food chain.
CONROY: They are protected
because they're in a national park.
It's really important that we manage
that population correctly.
You've got one or two hundred apex predators
on the island,
and even with a low rate of problematic interactions
between humans and dingoes,
inevitably, there's gonna be some issues.
NARRATOR: For the most part, dingoes on Fraser Island
have few interactions with human beings.
They're quite shy and nervous around people.
Exposed upon the beach,
the dingo is a golden sandy color,
with variable white markings on his chest,
the tip of his tail, and the bottoms of his feet,
which are often known as "socks".
The dingo is a rangy, fit animal,
which can roam over a large land area daily,
patrolling, hunting and scavenging beaches
for whatever might come to shore.
CONROY: Dingoes will eat basically anything.
Vegetation, fish, small marsupials,
insects, lizards, snakes,
anything they can get.
They're total omnivores, they're opportunistic,
they're wily creatures,
they'll just do anything they can to get a feed.
NARRATOR: The dingo isn't native to Australia
but arrived on these shores some 5,000 years ago,
in the company of East Asian seafarers.
Though there's debate around their ancestry,
generally it's believed that dingoes
descended from semi-domesticated dogs.
Over time, these animals began to run wild on the island,
and returned to their feral roots.
But wild animals that still look like lovable family pets
can lead to dangerous encounters.
When fully grown,
dingoes often settle into packs,
as this makes for easier living, and breeding.
But when young males enter their juvenile phase,
at around 10-12 months
they strike out as lone predators
in order to learn to hunt.
During this phase,
male dingoes will gain in testosterone
and begin to test their environments.
If they've already become accustomed to humans,
because scavenging scraps around people is easy
deadly problems might follow.
CONROY: In that juvenile male phase
they're trying to, you know,
do dominance-testing essentially.
So they're basically coming up and saying,
"Hey, here's me.
What's your stance on the whole situation?"
So a tourist who might not be well-versed
with the behavioral aspects of apex predators,
might misconstrue a bit of simple dominance-testing
as a real show of aggression,
that's gonna end badly.
NARRATOR: There have been tragic encounters over the years,
several people have been bitten,
one person killed.
Because of that death,
more than 30 dingoes were killed in a cull.
This led to more controversy,
as government agencies and environmentalists
clashed over the dingo's future here.
It's better for everyone then,
if human beings and dingoes observe one another
from a healthy, respectful distance.
As this dingo leaves the beach,
retreating into the foredunes and beyond,
things are as they should be.
Our two species separated by simple geography.
75 Mile Beach is also home
to the stuff of nightmares.
What lies beneath these Australian sands
is both completely everyday
and squirmingly repulsive.
This is the Digaster keastii,
otherwise known as Fraser Island's giant beach worm.
MEYER: They're huge. They get three to five feet long,
on average, but I've heard of even bigger ones than that.
These worms are just unbelievably quick,
and there are these professional worm catchers
on the island
because they're very good bait.
NARRATOR: And these bait worms are carnivores, themselves.
MEYER: So what these professional wormers do,
they drag dead fish or some sort of dead animal,
along in the water,
and the smell attracts these worms
that live in the sand.
And the worm comes along, and puts his head up
and he bites it.
And he arches his back, and when he's arching his back,
all these little feelers down through the sand
straighten up
and that's when they have to pick him up.
NARRATOR: The entire length of the worm
can then be "zippered" out of the sand,
and placed into a bucket for sale.
If this is "Paradise", as it's been dubbed
then it remains a wild paradise.
For most of the length of 75 Mile Beach,
there isn't a human swimmer to be found,
This is because of strong warnings
regarding dangerous tides
and strong rip currents here.
As well as poisonous jellyfish,
manta rays and sharks.
Safer waters exist at the Champagne Pools,
north on 75 Mile Beach.
Champagne Pools are a series of raised, rocky swimming holes
over which the tide can crash and recede.
Fizzing like so much sparkling wine.
The rocks that make up Champagne Pools,
as well as the nearby bluff Indian Head,
are some of the only rock forms
studding this island made of sand.
They are the only visible remainders
of an ancient volcano, long gone.
In the shadow of Indian Head
a pattern in the sand marks the undulating progress
of a sea snake.
Cast onto land by the strong tides,
it seeks to return to the Pacific
MEYER: Usually when they're on the beach
they're exhausted. They move very slowly
and they're quite tired.
They are, I think more venomous than any land snake,
they're highly venomous snakes.
NARRATOR: Called an elegant sea snake,
this muscular creature is wrapped in
39 to 44 blackish bands.
It has a very tiny head,
for pushing between cracks in coral reefs or rocks.
This allows the snake to find hiding little fish to eat.
Larger than the head is the paddle-like tail.
It's shaped like a rudder,
giving it powerful direction and propulsion in the water.
Aiming toward the sunset,
it makes its way back to the golden churn.
Here, what seems to be an alien creature
tumbling down the beach
is only a rolling seed ball.
It's a sign that a young beach
is reaching a new stage of maturity,
because this is vegetative life,
establishing its literal beachhead.
MEYER: The first plant that started growing on the bare sand
is a plant that's called beach spinifex.
Most beaches around the world would have something like it.
The way it reproduces it has these little
spiky seed casings that roll along in the wind.
They get blown along and then they get caught up
and then they'll send down a shoot from there.
NARRATOR: Fraser Island's prevailing winds
blow in a south-easterly direction
First pushing onto land
against the long, young strip of 75 Mile Beach.
This wind folds sand on top of sand,
creating subtle new geographic contours.
When the hearty seed balls bump against those contours,
they eventually catch, take root, and grow
extracting what nutrients they need
from the tiny amount of mineral content
available in every grain of sand.
The same mineral content that gives this young sand
its yellowish tinge.
MEYER: This is probably one of the first plants
to start growing on bare sand.
Extremely tough, it acts as a colonizing plant,
so it'll hold the dune system together
and allows more and more complex plants
to grow in a process called plant succession.
That initial kick-start,
that's what starts it all, really,
is the spinifex grass.
NARRATOR: Once enough spinifex takes root here,
it creates a foredune at the back of the entire beach.
This foredune is a protective barrier,
sheltering everything further inland
from the harshest of wind and salt.
This allows more exotic plants to grow inland.
As those inland plants flourish
and then die over generations
eventually their decaying turns sand into topsoil.
MEYER: And that's how the island was formed, really
The sand it comes from, comes from the ocean,
it builds up here as a big sand dune
then you get the plants and fungus growing together,
helping each other out in a symbiotic relationship.
And eventually a soil builds up and the plants grow.
If it was up to me I would classify Fraser
as a living thing, you know.
Everything all working in conjunction
like a single organism.
NARRATOR: As the wind blows new generations of sand on top,
the old sand, mixed with organic matter,
gets compacted.
As it gets compacted,
it also becomes concentrated.
The denser it gets, the darker it gets
and the more nutrient-rich it becomes.
Seen in cross-section,
this looks something like a layer cake,
and the experts call these layers
the A horizon and the B horizon.
SINCLAIR: This is really interesting
because in this road cutting
you can see how sand forms on Fraser Island,
how the nutrients form and get concentrated.
So this is the A horizon here,
and it's in the B horizon
where not only the color is richer
but also the nutrients are richer.
NARRATOR: In many locations on the island,
sand becomes stacked onto sand.
This can create striking, multicolored cliffs
like those found at the Pinnacles
and Red Canyon,
directly facing the Pacific Ocean.
The colors in the B horizon here,
yellow, orange and red,
are stains from rusting iron deposits.
MEYER: Iron accumulates in thin layers on the dunes over time.
It rusts, so it oxidizes,
and then gets washed down through the sand.
It binds all the sand dunes, all the sand grains together,
and it holds them tight.
It's very soft, you can break it up with your hand.
NARRATOR: Not only can it be broken up by hand,
but it can also be broken up by claw.
This nearby ghost crab digs into the base of a cliff,
excavating sand from its habitat.
Male ghost crabs make tidy piles of sand
next to the entrances to their homes,
while female ghost crabs scatter sand in all directions.
This particular burrow is made beneath
an outcropping of coffee rock.
Coffee rock isn't rock at all,
but a form of hardened, or "indurated", sand.
SINCLAIR: Wherever you've got coffee rock,
you'll know that at some stage in the past
it's been the bed of a lake or the bed of a swamp.
NARRATOR: Over eons,
organic matter in those lakes or swamps would rot,
settling on the bottom as a putrid layer.
And when the water evaporated,
that organic matter fused with sand
would still remain.
SINCLAIR: Coffee rock is a living organism in itself,
in many ways, because it
builds up more and more organic materials.
NARRATOR: Now, this exposed coffee rock
is almost a peaty, mummified version of itself.
But it still looks good enough to eat,
porous, spongy, like a toffee candy bar.
When water washes over a formation of coffee rock,
it will turn the color of dark coffee or tea.
But this hypnotic seep
is not dissolving coffee rock.
It's tannin-rich organic material
trickling away from one of Fraser Island's many creeks.
Fraser Island also has many lakes.
Lake Allom is a red water lake,
because of the amount of plant tannins
and organic materials washing their way into the water.
Where there is this much vegetative life,
animal life can also flourish.
Lake Allom can reasonably be said
to be teeming with small fish
and turtles.
Difficult to count as they swim
and jostle with each other.
There are two kinds of freshwater turtles here.
The more numerous Krefft's river turtles,
with short necks and distinctive
yellow streaks along the sides of their heads.
and long-necked turtles, with snaking necks
almost 60% the length of their bodies.
Their necks are so long
that they can't retract them directly into their shells,
but instead fold their heads and necks under their shells,
with a sideways, tucking motion.
The Krefft's river turtle
and the long-necked turtle ably co-exist,
nipping at fish all-year-round in Lake Allom's red water.
Another red water lake on the island
is Lake Boomanjin.
Though defined by the color of their water,
Lake Allom and Lake Boomanjin
are also both defined as perched lakes.
"Perched" means that these lakes are elevated above sea level,
and that they resist being absorbed
into the sandmass beneath them.
MEYER: You can dig a hole anywhere on Fraser Island,
and if you dig it deep enough
you'll always find fresh water.
So there's massive amounts.
There's something like four trillion liters
of fresh water sitting inside the island.
It acts like a giant sponge.
NARRATOR: But perched lakes
don't absorb into the island's water table.
Instead, they're like giant bird-baths,
where the water stays cupped in place.
This is because they're lined at the bottom
with a kind of coffee rock,
and this dense material keeps the lakes from draining.
Lake Boomanjin is the largest perched lake on Earth,
almost 500 acres in size,
and resting some 300 feet above sea level.
Scrubby forest surrounds Lake Boomanjin.
It is a lively and deadly environment
for many small species.
This tiny plant dots the shoreline.
Each flower is only an inch in diameter.
Vibrantly colored, the Drosera spatulata is carnivorous,
attracting insects with its nectar-tipped stalks.
This ant, one of over 280 species of ant on the island,
is looking to feed from the flower,
but then becomes food itself.
Glistening on these stalks
is a sticky compound and a digestive enzyme.
The ant wriggles in this trap,
its body already breaking down
into proteins for the plant to digest.
Also nearby, this golden silk orb weaver,
a couple of inches large,
waits for her prey.
This spider's striped, yellow legs
have evolved to aim inward,
allowing her to specialize in the weaving of elaborate webs.
It's said that the golden silk orb weaver
makes such strong webs
that the Aborigines would collect their strands
and thread them together, to make a resilient string.
Having caught a fly,
this female wastes no time in immobilizing the insect,
then wrapping it in silk.
She lowers the fly on a new thread,
putting it aside for later
then waits for her next catch.
There is comparatively little life
at the beaches of Lake McKenzie,
which is a clear, or white, water lake.
At this lake's bottom,
there's microscopic aluminum within the grains of sand.
This aluminum allows a special chemical process to take place.
It's a process that sifts away organic materials,
eliminating them, like a natural water filter.
With almost no minerals or nutrients left
in this crystal-clear water,
it's beautiful to look at
but can barely sustain any life at all.
And surrounding that water is a gorgeous beach
made of fine, white silica.
This means the sand here is basically
tiny granules of dull glass.
It's ideal sand for sunbathing
but it's exhausted sand
in its ability to support natural life.
Like the water,
there's little-to-no mineral value left in it.
"White sand" and "white water"
are both indications
that Lake McKenzie is an older area of the island.
NARRATOR: Roving sandblows on the island
seem like they have a mind of their own.
A sandblow is a moving sand dune,
pushed inland by prevailing southeasterly winds.
Sandblows happen when plant life
that usually acts as a barrier
to keep the beach restrained is destroyed.
These foredune plants can be harmed by fire,
cyclones, too much tourist traffic,
or any combination of these.
Without a buffer now,
the sand can leave the beach
and travel as a moving dune inland.
MEYER: They move about a meter, maybe two meters a year,
and they just bury everything in their path,
and so essentially they're like this giant wave.
The largest ones, they get up to
probably 4 kilometers long
and many kilometers wide.
NARRATOR: These sandblows splay across the heathlands
and forests altering the landscape.
Above this growing sandblow
stands a solitary ghost crab.
Ghost crabs change direction incredibly quickly,
and can approach speeds of 10 miles an hour.
Having one enlarged front claw
is evidence that this crab is a male.
Speeding across the sandblow,
his limbs leave behind a trail of tiny prints.
There are currently 43 sandblows on Fraser Island,
and one of the most famous is Hammerstone Sandblow,
which is slowly but unstoppably consuming Lake Wabby.
SINCLAIR: So this sandblow here, Hammerstone Sandblow,
probably originated about 15 or 16 kilometers away.
It's a very dynamic landscape
because the wind is sweeping the sand
from the surface of that sandblow
bringing it forward in waves
and then slowly they're starting to engulf the lake.
NARRATOR: Lake Wabby is an example of a barrage lake,
meaning that it has been dammed in place by the sandblow.
This causes the water's surface area to shrink over time,
but its depth to increase,
as the water displaces to narrower, taller heights
against the bracket of the tree line
and the forward-moving sand continues to bulldoze.
CONROY: Lake Wabby is one of the most
iconic lakes on the island.
So you've got this gorgeous lake
that's created by the sand blow,
and then is also going to be engulfed
and consumed and destroyed by it as well.
So, yeah, one of nature's little tricks I suppose.
NARRATOR: But there are two sides to every story.
MEYER: And even though they're a destructive
sort of phenomenon initially,
like, they bury the entire forest,
every hill on Fraser Island
at one stage looked like that, right?
So they're actually a very creative process.
You go back there to any of those sand dunes that you see
on the island,
in a thousand years, it'll all be plants again.
NARRATOR: Over time, the sand at the center of Fraser Island
has compacted into deep, rich soil
supporting almost 20,000 acres of rainforest.
The lace monitor, or goanna,
spends most of its life
in and around these rainforest trees,
but comes down to the ground to forage for food.
This big lizard is a relative of the Komodo dragon,
and can grow to lengths of almost seven feet.
It has a powerful build, and sharp, curving claws,
which it uses to climb.
Its flickering tongue is deeply forked,
like the tongue of a snake.
This tongue detects highly sensitive information
about smell
and, because it's forked,
it can process that information
in two different directions at the same time.
This gives the monitor a heightened sense of whether
a potential mate, predator,
or prey might be nearby.
This particular monitor is sluggish,
like it's just eaten. Though its diet
includes insects, it appears to be in no hurry
to interrupt the highway of ants bustling behind it.
Higher in the trees,
the laughing kookaburra is one of the world's
largest kingfishers, native to Australia.
Its name comes from the insistent cackle
of its territorial call.
Laughing kookaburras are patient carnivores,
spending much of their time waiting for prey,
like mice, lizards and insects.
They stake out on branches,
and swoop into action when they spot food.
Whatever water this bird needs,
it gets exclusively from the food it eats.
Even in a rainforest,
it drinks no additional rainwater.
Laughing kookaburras make nests for themselves,
like this one, out of tumorous mounds
created by tree-dwelling termites.
After feasting on these termites,
the kookaburra will lay her eggs,
and rear her chicks, inside this hollow.
Generally, laughing kookaburras mate for life.
NARRATOR: This Brush Box evergreen
is a host organism for the strangler fig tree
wrapping around it in a long, lattice weave.
In a dense rainforest setting,
trees compete for water, nutrients and sunlight.
The strangler fig germinates at the top of the brush box,
in order to steal that sunlight then sends its roots
crisscrossing back toward the ground.
Little by little, the strengthening fig tree
will smother the life from the brush box.
SINCLAIR: These little tiny roots slowly expand,
they're feeding off the detritus
and the dead material inside the bark,
they keep growing and expanding, meshing,
and finally they completely encapsulate the tree.
It's one of the most wonderful examples of nature.
NARRATOR: Eventually, all that will remain of the brush box
will be a hollow center.
In its own way, though,
the strangler fig is a bringer of life,
its sweet fruit is one of the key foods
for animals in this rainforest.
Meanwhile, this gigantic tree
is found virtually nowhere else on earth.
But on Fraser Island,
the Satinay can live more than 1,000 years,
stretch to 130 feet in height,
and widen to a thickness of 10 feet.
Before Fraser Island's heritage status took hold,
these trees were abused by a busy logging industry
and many of the largest Satinays were felled.
SINCLAIR: And it was certainly
a lustrous timber when it was sawn
but I think it looks more beautiful in this forest.
NARRATOR: A great tree among many,
in a great, green interior
all rooted in soil created from the beach beneath it.
On the western side of Fraser Island,
mangrove forests dominate two thirds of the coastline.
Mangroves straddle land and sea,
their roots anchoring in mud
while propping the main tree above water.
For this reason, the roots are called stilt roots.
Above water, stilt roots absorb air
through pores in their bark,
and below water, their corklike constitution
plays a part in filtering away salt.
Mangroves can eliminate an amazing 90% of salt
from their drinking water,
making them uniquely suited
to tough, intertidal conditions.
After this filtration happens in the root,
it's believed that any excess, remaining salt
gets purged through the shedding of leaves.
These leaves are called sacrificial leaves.
Mangrove forests are key nurseries and feeding grounds
for animals on Fraser Island's west coast.
NARRATOR: Where the west opens into wide beaches again,
an amazing sight emerges
and emerges
and emerges some more!
Full battalions of solider crabs
seem to materialize from nowhere,
surfacing from their mucky burrows.
Only a fraction of an inch in size,
this dark-blue species forages
rustling up bits of microscopic food,
just washed to shore.
MEYER: They make these tiny little balls of sand,
they scrape the top of the sand
into a little pile in front of them,
and they put it in a liquid,
a mixture of spit and water.
It dissolves all the nutrients
that might have settled on the top of the sand
during the tide. So what they do,
they'll make it into a ball,
dissolve it all, and then they just suck it all up.
They suck up the liquid
and it takes all the dissolved nutrients as well.
NARRATOR: Once a soldier crab
consumes the nutrients in a particular ball,
it discards the sand and forages for more.
Here, the sand balls remain wet,
like so much soggy porridge.
This species scuttles forward on its legs,
where many crabs move in a sideways fashion.
They'll also corkscrew into the ground when disturbed
putting a literal "twist" on beach living.
These crabs are air breathers,
and create oxygen pockets for themselves
beneath the wet sand.
During high tide, they'll wait in these individual burrows,
in order to avoid being eaten by fish.
Then, when the sands expose again,
soldier crabs resume their beach-wide march.
NARRATOR: The sands of Fraser Island
march in their own way, as well.
Rolling off the sea,
up the young, eastern beach;
released into roving sandblows
to wander the landscape;
accumulating nutrients from the plants
they tilled in travel;
or from the rainwater they absorbed;
becoming a rich, dark soil
to support the tallest of trees;
then out the other side again,
retired, as a white silica stripped of minerals.
CONROY: So I think
you always keep needing to take yourself back
to that significance that it is,
it's growing on barren, hostile sand,
and that it's doing a pretty good job of it.
NARRATOR: Fraser Island is a miraculous ecosystem,
this place called "Paradise",
this sandmass,
this island,
this one Living Beach,
built out of countless, shifting grains.
♪ THEME MUSIC ♪