A new and controversial book is set to reignite the debate about Fraser Island’s environmental management, arguing that professional forestry has sustained the island’s forests far more effectively than current preservation policies.
The book Paradise Preserved: A History of Forestry on Fraser Island by veteran forester Robert Onfray presents more than a century of documented evidence that challenges the dominant narrative about the world’s largest sand island.
“The forests that tourists admire today were shaped by 120 years of professional management, not left untouched,” says Onfray, who spent over 40 years in forestry across Queensland, New South Wales, and Tasmania.
The book was launched in Brisbane on Wednesday at the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, with further presentations scheduled for Maryborough on Thursday and Gympie on Monday, November 17.
“Yet this history is being deliberately erased,” he said.
The 366-page book draws on extensive archival research, historical photographs, and interviews with forestry workers and their families to document Fraser Island’s timber industry from the 1860s through to logging’s cessation in 1991.
But Onfray’s work goes beyond history. With catastrophic bushfires increasingly linked to fuel load buildup from fire suppression policies, the book’s findings have urgent contemporary relevance.
“We’re seeing the results of hands-off management across Australian forests – more intense fires, invasive species takeovers, and ecosystem decline,” Onfray explains.
“Fraser Island demonstrates that active, science-based management produced healthier forests than ideological preservation.”
The book documents sustained yield practices, forest regeneration data, and silvicultural techniques that maintained productive forests while preserving biodiversity. It also examines current management challenges including fire mismanagement, tourism impacts, and problematic dingo policies.
“As fire historian Stephen Pyne wrote: “What thrives on disturbance dies in its absence,'” Onfray notes. “Australian eucalypt forests are fire creatures. The evidence from Fraser Island proves this.”
Onfray worked on Fraser Island as a forestry student in the 1980s, experiencing firsthand the remote areas few visitors ever see. His research includes access to William Pettigrew’s diaries, Queensland State Archives, and the McKenzie family photo collection documenting early 20th-century operations.
Paradise Preserved: A History of Forestry on Fraser Island features a foreword by renowned mountaineer and forestry advocate Tim Macartney-Snape OAM, who climbed Mount Everest from sea level to summit and studied forestry at ANU.
The book was published by Connor Court Publishing and includes historical photographs, original maps of tramlines and logging areas, and comprehensive technical appendices.
