'Unfinished business' lures couple back to Queensland island paradise

Louise Collier was 41 weeks pregnant, living on a remote tropical island in the Great Barrier Reef, when a warning came in for potentially damaging winds.

It was February 2005, the midst of a Far North Queensland wet season, and Louise and her husband Steve Sharpe agreed that was to be their signal to travel to the mainland in case their baby arrived.

Little Tom Sharpe was born the next day.

The rough conditions passed and a day-old Tom was bundled on to the family boat with his older siblings and taken back to Low Isles, the off-grid coral sand cay his parents were responsible for looking after.

Located 15 kilometres offshore from Port Douglas, it was the idyllic setting for the first four years of Tom's life.

Now 21, he has just returned with his parents, who are beginning their second stint as caretakers.

'Find me a tropical island'

Low Isles is the only island with live-in caretakers as part of the Great Barrier Reef's joint field management program.

The job involves maintaining the grounds, repairing buildings and water systems, watching for any unauthorised boat arrivals, and engaging with the 50,000 tourists who visit the isles annually.

Louise Collier and Steve Sharpe first took on the physically demanding gig as volunteers in July 2003, before winning a tender to continue in a paid capacity two years later.

Mr Sharpe said he came across the opportunity while living in West Australia's remote Kimberley, looking for a sea change.

He was visiting relatives in Townsville when he spotted a public notice.

"Before he left, he said, 'If I go live in Queensland, would you come and join me?'" Ms Collier recalled.

"And I said, 'If you find me a tropical island'."

Mr Sharpe, who'd lived at Lake Argyle in remote northern WA, was no stranger to remote living.

A bird-lover and nature enthusiast, he also relished the "picture-postcard" island where the young family would swim with turtles, watch tropical reef fish, and walk to neighbouring Woody Island at low tide.

"You feel very honoured, privileged to be looking after something so many people in the community love,"

he said.

Ms Collier, an artist, recalled how the captivating natural beauty meant she was "never bored".

"When you're in the city, you don't know what phase of the moon it is unless you're noticing, but we kind of had to know," she said.

"It was really nice to be immersed in nature and live your life by nature's clock rather than what's going on in the city."

Family circumstances led them to call time on their caretaking stint in December 2008.

"I felt like we had unfinished business there," Ms Collier said.

"In the back of both of our minds, I think we thought we might go again one day."

A new outlook

That time having now come, the couple expects their second experience on Low Isles to be different.

A modern solar energy system means they no longer need to painstakingly cart 200 litres of fuel each month by boat in jerry cans.

In the 2000s, the islands had very little mobile reception, while high-speed satellite internet has replaced a "primitive" dial-up connection that used a VHF antenna.

Vegetation has also grown considerably since the "particularly dry" period.

"Lots of palm trees had keeled over and the undergrowth was a lot less dense than it is now, and I believe we may be entering that phase again," Ms Collier said.

Their children, two of whom joined them for the journey, have also grown up.

Acacia recalled an island upbringing her friends couldn't relate to.

"Not having mobile phone reception was a massive thing and we weren't glued to a TV on our school holidays."

Ms Collier said the children would earn 10 cents of pocket money for each piece of rubbish they collected that washed ashore, with much of the junk being relics from old dumps left by the island's former lighthouse keepers dating as far back as the 1870s.

She said her daughter remembered a trick her children might not be able to get away with on their latest island stint.

"Acacia is sitting here smiling because she and the girls sometimes used to break one piece in half … so they'd get double the money," Ms Collier said.