The last days of Eden

Company man a sense of humour is a must when living on a deserted island. David Glasheen went on the dating site RSVP, but there are all these crazies out there and nothing came of it.

He was a refugee of the 1987 sharemarket crash - a millionaire businessman turned castaway. But now a court ruling could see David Glasheen evicted from his beloved island home. Susan Chenery reports.

After some alarmingly hectic bailing of water by the bearded man, the tin boat lifts its prow and slowly noses its way out of the bay of the tiny town of Portland Roads in far north Queensland. Away from the mangrove swamp and the flash of a scaly tail, around the point of great boulders pounded into sculptures by the sea and out onto open water, the bow smashing down on the waves, the wake a wide streak of white.

To come this far, I have travelled north from NSW and kept going. And then kept going some more. And now, after a journey of 30 bouncing minutes across turquoise waters, the bearded man and I have reached our destination and his home, Restoration Island. The green, 40-hectare hump idles pacifically within its coral reef, barely a suggestion of a dot on the map just off the tip of Cape York, Australia's northernmost peninsula.

Mans best friend David Glasheen with Quasi. I am not alone, he says. I have a dog. Photo: Brian Cassey

Together, we pull the leaking boat onto the white, white sand - the same "sandy point" on which the unfortunate Captain William Bligh stepped on May 29, 1789, after his crew mutinied and Christian Fletcher set him adrift in the Bounty longboat for 30-odd days with 18 loyal men.

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"This being the Day of the Restoration of King Charles II, and the name being not inapplicable to my present situation (for it has restored us to fresh life and strength), I named it Restoration Island," he wrote in his diary.

The island was unchanged and still uninhabited when David Glasheen washed up on a high tide at the tail end of the wet season in April 1997. In spite of increasingly strenuous efforts to move him along in recent years, he has remained here ever since. He has blended into its contours, as much a part of the island as it is of him, another of the many species of native fauna. It is an elemental existence, one shaped by the seasons, the tides, the winds, the rhythms of the natural world; it is a call to the wild. He never wears shoes or, indeed, clothes, except when visitors are present. For rare formal occasions, he has exactly one shirt.

Plenty of bottle Glasheen makes his own beer, which he trades for fish. Photo: Brian Cassey

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The last days of Eden