This week, your intrepid investigative journalist has been exploring the practice and business of ecotourism. He has travelled by scary single prop plane to the remote Lady Elliot Island way out on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. I hope you’re grateful I’ve endured this hardship.

No Australian we knew had heard of it, despite a warm recommendation from my friend C. But a few days before we went, some Australian heard me singing in a bar in Redfern. I let it be known that I am ‘On Tour’. As I came off stage, she slipped her hand into my trouser pocket, conspiratorially whispering ‘This is the very best experience in Australia’. I gulped. Man! Rock And Roll! I knew my luck was in. It was. She’d put a piece of paper there with those three magical words – ‘Lady Elliot Island’.

50 miles off the Queensland coast, the island is approached by a 12 seater plane from Hervey Bay, itself one of the lesser known reaches of the Virgin Australia empire. I sat up alongside John the Pilot, the better to quiz him about living on the azure edge. His eyes twinkled and with his rich tan and full head of hair (the bastard) he was a cross between Sacha Distel and Robert Redford – even his Raybans were a bit 1969. I wanted to hear tales of derring do, but he just wanted to talk about Thin Lizzy, Mott The Hoople and Suzi Quattro’s trousers. On his iPhone he found me 1970s album covers sadly lost to the world. Neither hand remained on the tiller/joystick thingy. We lived, despite this affront to both my aesthetic values and my sense of self preservation.

As we approached, I recognised paradise. Smaller than Kings Cross station, the flat coral island held trees, a small amount of scrub and a low-rise resort. Edging it was the whitest sand, and then a ring of azure – the coral reef – and then the wide sea. We came in to land on a grass strip that ran the length of the island, bisecting it.

I won’t bore you with tales of us snorkelling amongst fish of every shape, size and colour. That it was as if God had been tripping and hit the shuffle button on his Create!!! ™ app. I won’t tell you either about the beautiful turtles we saw swimming so gracefully in their multitudes. I won’t tell you about the huge variety of seabirds. I certainly won’t tell you about the soaring gangs of Frigate birds, mesmerising, beautiful and frightening as they circled high overhead. I’m not going to tell you anything about all that, because you in the UK will have seen David Attenborough do it much better on his recent BBC series about the Great Barrier Reef. On Lady Elliot Island, turtles rule OK.

It is run as an eco-tourist resort, and has been granted the highest standard of certification for environmental conservation anywhere in Australia. Which, to be frank, might say precisely fuck all. The Australian idea of environmental protection is to mine only half the whole gigantic continent and generously leave the rest to nature. As about .0003% of the landmass is inhabited (my personal estimate), this is not extraordinary custodianship.

You are informed as you land that if you weigh more when you leave than when you arrive, it will be surgically removed from you (Douglas Adams ™). If you are found to have picked up anything from the island, you are transported to a cold harsh climate in the northern hemisphere, where all foreigners are reviled, to end your days in hardship and penury, with no hope of sunshine or turtles.

A month ago, I was out walking with B, a young man who works in eco resorts. He’s a marine biologist and also into the Hospitality Thang, having worked in Cambodia for years. I asked him how I would know a good eco resort if I saw one.

He reeled a list off – how they get their water, how much of it they recycle, where they get their food, how much of it is grown locally, how they treat their sewage (fairly, one hopes), how much water they recycle, where they get their power (do they abuse it?), how much they commit to local communities, what environmental research they do etc etc. And of course, how clear their policies are and how they monitor progress against their goals (I smell management consultants).

I asked the press office (aka Reception) if someone would spend some time with me. One of the management team, R, arrived bright eyed, bushy tailed and thoroughly oblivious to the imminent probing interrogation that would set his feet a-quaking..

‘G’day!’, he warmly greeted me. His handshake all but severed my hand from my wrist. ‘Let me show you round!’ And off we went ‘behind the scenes’.

Blimey, there’s nothing more tedious than an eco zealot showing off his equipment. ‘You want to know about our waste? Sure. Here are our sewage treatment vats. Let me open one for you. Our guests produce 73 tonnes of waste each period and our job is to make sure it’s safe. Just stick your nose in there my friend. Good eh? Bacteria is great’. I retched. Seriously though, no waste needs be expelled away from the tanks.

‘Let me show you our electricity substation.’ I was agog with excitement. R showed me his banks of solar panels, his fabulous German yellow boxes that did something important but tedious, and in the battery house, gave me a compelling lecture on the competing virtues of Nordic, German and Alaskan battery charging (and discharging) methods. 85% of all the power needed is generated by solar. The old diesel generator sits rotting sulkily in the corner.

All rainfall is left to provide a balanced, natural habitat for the trees and flora. All drinking water comes from the sea. The well – tick. The pump – got it. The desalination plant – I’m going to gnaw my leg off. But R insisted on showing me a cross section of the water filter, made from recycled newspaper, which removes 90% of the salt in one pass. That is pretty impressive: certainly I could tell from R’s body language that he expected my flabber to be gasted.

I appreciated the eco-credentials – anyway, how would Little Consumerist Me know different?

They are awful at promoting and advertising, but by word of mouth visitor numbers are sharply up from 30 per day, to 60 – 130 (the maximum allowed). I asked R what the main issues are in managing Lady Elliot Island.

‘We have owners who really care. They’re in it for the long haul, they don’t own the land or the fixtures and fittings, so the investment in solar is because it’s the right thing to do. They cost $20,000 a pop, and we get no grants. The biggest issue we face is staff: getting the right people who will stay, not try to shag everyone and everything in sight, behave in line for the showers, and not bunk off snorkelling when they should be cooking the calamari.’

And does this place make a profit? ‘No, we’ve been losing money since we started. We have no income apart from tourists and we attract no research money. We’re making a profit now because people are beginning to hear of us. Who knows if that will last’.

I have, on occasion, been considered cynical by some. I think of it as healthy scepticism. But Lady Elliot Island blew me away. And they have great food, by the way….

There’s a wider question of course, about Australians’ relationship with The Environment, on which I am not qualified to enquire or have an opinion. Apparently.

It’s a complex thing. Generally, people have a huge respect for their natural environment. As a simple yardstick, there’s hardly any litter anywhere. Apart from the unwanted furniture and dogshit on our street. They talk passionately and lovingly about the natural world, though most venture no further than the bush at the end of their suburb. Most Australians have, apparently, never even seen a snake (aah, we are are so at home in the wild, now, TC and me. And gimme more spiders…). They hold in awe conservationists such as Miles and Milo Dunphy who led the movement in New South Wales to pursue retention of wilderness in wonderful places like the Blue Mountains. They do seem to genuinely care.

But then there’s another side. There’s the mining, which is aggressive and predatory. There’s new ways of making money from the vast spaces – like the South Australia commission which, only last week, found in favour of taking in the world’s nuclear fuel waste to their backyard and burying it. They propose to set up a sovereign wealth fund ‘to accumulate and equitably share the profits from the storage and disposal of (nuclear) waste’. Great, where can I sign up?

There’s the fact that the Blue Mountain routes, supposedly forged by brave settlers, had for centuries been Aboriginal tracks anyway. There’s the tourist nonsense: on nearby Fraser Island, 100 miles by 20, we were constantly warned about the threat of dingos and the need for constant vigilance. Yet, when you probe you find there are only 200 dingos in an area the size of Manchester (maybe) and your chances of seeing one are precisely zero.

Overall, there is some myth making here, as in all facets of Australian culture. There’s a search for a history to share and tell, for a landscape that is ‘owned’ by all and which both reflects and forges the national character, for an expression of what it means to be Australian in this place, with its diverse topology, weather, habitats and wildlife. And telling that story takes time, care and guardianship of everything around them.

Me and you and you and me

No matter how they toss the dice, it has to be

The only one for me is you and you for me

So happy together

Gordon and Bonner, for The Turtles, 1967