Here are the available villas for rental in Queensland.

Glorious Aussie tucker

From the Daily Mail

There have always been many reasons to visit Australia. The beaches, the jolly inhabitants, the sunshine, scenery and emptiness. But until relatively recently, the cooking was not one of them.
In fact, 'Australian cuisine' was traditionally considered something of an oxymoron, conjuring up images of stodgy meat pies washed down by lashings of lager.
But, of course, that has all changed. Like its wine (which used to be derided in Europe as sickly rubbish fit only for skid row) Australian cooking is now famously top notch.
Indeed, from the evidence of my recent first visit, I believe it may well be that you can eat better in Australia than anywhere else on Earth.
Australia, to my mind, is like a sort of supercharged California. Brisbane is like Los Angeles without the gridlock, the crime and the smog.
Queensland, our destination, has the weather that California thinks it has (but hasn't), the beaches (ditto) and most definitely the food.
How can this be so? How can a country with its roots so firmly in Britain produce cooking (and service) so sublime and so cheap?
There are many reasons. Firstly, the Australian dollar is currently a basketcase, referred to by locals almost fondly as the 'Pacific Peso' and with good reason.
At nearly three dollars to the pound, the exchange rate feels like you are getting a 50 per cent advantage. Prices range from the reasonable to the laughable.
Secondly, Australia is blessed with an abundance of natural produce of unerringly high quality. ... more

Whales galore

You just have to hand it to the Australians: they know how to look after their natural inheritance.
Easier, of course, when there are so few people spread over such a large area. But it still makes it an exhilarating country to visit.
Twenty miles from Brisbane, and less than 100 miles from the Gold Coast, which has been the victim of over-development, is a jewel of an island, no bigger than the Isle of Man, which felt like a throwback to the Fifties in its unspoiled charm.
If Moreton Island were in the Caribbean, it would have been overrun by hotels years ago. As it is, there are no roads, just a few bush tracks.
It is one of those paradisaical landscapes where the sun always shines, the sea is like a warm bath and there is enough sand for everyone.
More than enough. Penetrate beyond the palm-fringed beaches and you realise that the entire island, just 10 miles off the coast of Queensland, is made of sand.
It is an extraordinary landscape. There are a few rocky headlands, some scrubland, lakes and forest, but, basically, it is a mini-desert in the middle of the sea - incredibly beautiful in an austere, other-worldly way.
Mount Tempest, its highest point and possibly the highest sand dune in the world, rises to almost 300 metres, but is as bare as a snow-covered alp.
You could go tobogganing down it, as some people do, hurtling down the sandy slopes on waxed boards.
If that sounds gimmicky, the sort of thing that happens when too many tourists are chasing too few attractions, Moreton Island is not that sort of place at all.
Most of it is a conservation area. Even the hotel where I stayed, the Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort, is light years from the swanky pleasure palaces in the Caribbean. ... more

Small and truly beautiful

Heron Island is a diver's dream and a positive paradise for romantics.
It must be the closest you can get to Australia's Great Barrier Reef by land - a mere 20ft from the balcony of the suite where I stayed.
This idyllic spot - as popular with honeymooners as it is with diving enthusiasts - lies at the southern tip of the 1,250-mile reef, the largest in the world.
The best way to arrive is by helicopter. It takes 30 minutes from the mainland.
As we descended, a thousand starfish twinkled in the gleaming blue waters surrounding the island with its pristine, soft, white sandy beaches.
From the air you can see it's only a dot in the ocean, one of the rather unimaginatively named Capricorn group of islands - they're on the Tropic of Capricorn - lying 45 miles off Gladstone in central Queensland.
Here, small is not only beautiful but personal - you are met by the local general manager of the firm which owns the place, P&O Australian Resorts.
He's Tony Stapleton, and with immense enthusiasm, he starts to tell us about the delights of Heron. He clearly loves his work and this passion extends to all his staff.
The island only measures 42 acres and, with a circumference of just over a mile, it takes less than 30 minutes to walk around the entire place.
I did it several times but was never bored because each time you see more. My four days there were not enough.
Heron Island is home to thousands of turtles, birds and an extraordinary range of marine life, including humpback whales, which can be seen offshore between June and October. ... more

Dive into a world of new discoveries

From the Daily Mail

A scene more perfect than Catseye Beach on Australia's Hamilton Island would be hard to imagine. And that, said my friend Anna, was the problem. How do you take swaying palm trees, the white sand, the azure sea seriously? Even the immaculate shopfronts and gleaming streets looked as if they had been put together for a film set.
We wondered if there was anything behind those impeccable facades. Having discovered the place was inhabited by cockatoos, all beautifully behaved and spotlessly white, we felt we had arrived on another planet.
In a sense, we had. The Whitsunday Islands, discovered by Captain Cook in 1770, are almost as far from Britain as it is possible to get, and there is a powerful sensation of otherworldliness. Most holiday paradises have a shabby side, but here there is a feeling of being transported to someone's crafted vision of perfection.
'There is one rule on this ship,' said Les, skipper of the sailing yacht Banjo Paterson. 'Never throw anything overboard.' Les is a skipper straight from central casting. He has one leg, a wicked smile and needs only one of those cockatoos on his shoulder to become Long John Silver.
Yet Les's rule echoes the ethos of this place: it is a pristine corner of the natural world and the people want it to stay that way. Large motor vehicles are banned and holidaymakers, mostly Australian and Japanese, whizz along Hamilton's narrow, undulating roads in golf buggies.
The Japanese come here in droves to get married in the island's tiny All Saints Chapel. Anna soon got caught up in the romance of it all and sent her boyfriend a postcard of the chapel. On the back she wrote: 'Wish you were here.' We waited for a couple of days, passing our time very happily on Catseye Beach but when it became clear that no marriage proposal would be forthcoming, we visited the Great Barrier Reef instead.
It is the world's largest ecosystem. There are 6,900 reefs divided into three types: ribbon reefs dotted for miles, fringing reefs which surround the 600 mostly uninhabited islands, and patching reefs which stick up from the ocean floor miles from anywhere. The chain runs south from the northeastern tip of Queensland for almost 1,000 miles. Some are only a few miles from the mainland, others are up to 100 miles out to sea.
A catamaran left the island every day for Hardy Reef, two hours away. On its edge was a pontoon called Reefworld, where you can dive, snorkel and take trips along the reef in a semi submersible boat. We boarded the catamaran and I determined, with some trepidation, to go diving. Anna settled for snorkelling. On the way to the reef, we were given a talk on the dos and don'ts of diving. Remember to breathe, they said, which seemed obvious. ... more

A thief at the reef

From the Mail on Sunday

Last year a job took my boyfriend to Birmingham for some months. He rented a high-rise flat which offered decent accommodation but the balcony was unusable as it was plagued by an army of pigeons. Every effort to persuade the feathery ones to move on failed and he was forced to concede defeat. His loathing of these birds waned when the resident Mrs Pigeon gave birth - and he even entertained thoughts about transplanting mother and baby back to London.
My thoughts turned to those Birmingham days when I was shown to our suite in the Reef View Hotel on Hamilton Island as there, perched along both balconies, was a gang of cockatoos, as confident in their claim to their territory as the Brummie pigeons had been.
But unlike the pigeons, the cockatoos are dramatically beautiful. They roam freely on the island and, though not tame, are friendly and amusing entertainers. They also ensure that no alarm clock is required as they can be relied upon to announce in full voice when it is time for breakfast.
In the heart of the Whitsunday Islands, Hamilton Island is the largest of the 12 which are inhabited and it is the only one with an airport catering for direct commercial and charter flights. There are approximately 50 flights a week, principally from Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne and Sydney.
The Whitsundays comprise 74 islands in the Coral Sea between the Queensland coast and the Great Barrier Reef. The islands acquired their unusual name because Captain Cook discovered the Whitsundays Passage on that religious feast day.
Hamilton has a year- round tropical climate with an average temperature of 27.4C and stretches just over three miles from north to south and two from east to west. Cars are not permitted, but if you don't feel like walking you have the entertaining option of travelling by motorised beach buggy. It takes a little while to realise that no amount of pressure on the gas pedal is going to make it go any faster, but the buggies are great fun and a perfect antidote to hazardous traffic and fumes.
As crime is almost non-existent, the police have little else to do but seek out disobedient drivers who break the buggy curfew. The locals in turn have fun devising ruses to distract the police to enable their friends to make a late post-party drive home. This is how tough life gets on the island. ... more