Keith Sinclair spent much of his childhood zigzagging around K’gari in a Studebaker truck with his dad, on a constant lookout for dingoes.
As they were notoriously shy and skittish towards humans, often the closest he’d get would be discovering faint traces of their paw prints in the sand near his campsite. By the next day, the wind would blow the tracks away, as if the animals were never really there to begin with.
“I’ve been going [to K’gari] since I was a one-year-old, and you almost never saw a dingo at all,” Sinclair, now 53, says.
A few hours north of Brisbane, K’gari, the world’s largest sand island, remains an extraordinarily successful tourism destination, hosting hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
In June, the island was stripped of its colonial name, Fraser Island, and restored to K’gari, which means ‘paradise’ in the local Butchulla language.
It’s a fitting name for a stunning island that’s home to spectacular sand blows, freshwater lakes and towering eucalyptus forests.
For thousands of years, the Butchulla people coexisted with dingoes, which were brought over to K’gari by Asian fishers.
The “wat’dha” or camp dingo were Butchulla companions, helping them hunt and protecting them from bad spirits. The “wongari” were wild dingoes that roamed the sweeping coastline hunting for wallabies, lizards and rodents. When the last Indigenous people were removed from the island, all the dingoes became wild.
But a string of recent dingo attacks has rangers worried the animals are no longer scared of humans and that tourist behaviour is causing escalations in their aggression.
One particularly “high-risk” animal was killed by injection on Wednesday after an attack on a 24-year-old woman who was hospitalised after being mauled by four dingoes while jogging down the beach.
The dingo had also been “responsible” for four “very severe” attacks, including one on a child this year, according to principal ranger, Danielle Mansfield.
A department of environment spokesperson said the dingo that was put down weighed 17 kilograms, “which is heavy for a dingo and indicated it had been fed”.
“It was also clear from its behaviour that it had become habituated, either by being fed or from people interacting with it for videos and selfies.”
‘In the past they’d never approach you’
Sinclair’s father, John, was a renowned local campaigner who spent decades on the successful fight to end sand mining and logging on the island before his death in 2019.
Sinclair estimates he’s visited the island hundreds of times and says he first detected a shift in dingo behaviour in the mid-90s.
“I was sitting on the beach observing one of the lakes, and a dingo came and walked around my picnic blanket. It was stalking me. It was quite disturbing,” he said.
“We went for a swim and then it came down and just pulled the lid off the esky and grabbed some things and ran away.”
This year, a dingo ran towards Sinclair and his wife while they were taking photos of birds on the beach.
“In the past, they’d never approach you. But it’s ridiculous the number of times I’ve seen humans hand-feeding dingoes,” he says.
Nobody knows for sure exactly why attacks are becoming more frequent, but almost everyone Guardian Australia spoke to believes it is linked to the growth in tourism on the island.
This week, two women were fined $2,300 each for taking selfies with the animals in a blatant breach of “dingo safety” protocol repeated at length in signage and brochures available to tourists on the island.
Visitors are told never to walk alone, leave children unattended or go running. It’s an offence to feed or intentionally attract or disturb the dingoes whose presence creates the authentic Australian experience many tourists seek.
Animal behaviourist Bradley Smith blames visitors in search of the perfect social media shot for changes in the animals’ behaviour.
“We don’t have a dingo problem on the island, we have a people problem,” he says.
“If you want to go for a run on the beach, go to the Gold Coast. If you go to Africa or the Rocky Mountains, you respect the fact that you’re around wildlife that can kill you.”
Smith says people are ignorant to the danger of dingoes because they are small and puppy-like, prompting tourists to give them a “cheeky bit of fruit” to get a great photo.
“That might be a benign incident for you, but that’s setting the scene for the future. It’s like a death sentence for a dingo when you start feeding.”
Sinclair agrees. “I hear people say all the time ‘but I want to feed them because they’re so skinny’ … but dingoes are a naturally lean animal,” he says. “You could literally feed them a lot of food and in a day they’d be skinny again, like a greyhound.”
Sinclair believes there should be further enforcement of fines, and potentially a one- or two-strike rule implemented to exclude problem visitors from the island.
K’gari attracts two distinct types of tourists: those who head to the resorts and go on organised tours, and independent campers who relish the opportunity to take a four-wheel drive on the wide open sands.
Since the pandemic, senior ranger Linda Behrendorff says she’s seeing worsening behaviour from people who’ve recently joined the latter group.
They’ve recently bought their first four-wheel-drive and they’re hitting nature reserves all across Queensland, often with too much alcohol, she says. And they won’t be told the rules.
“I’ve actually booked someone for feeding once. Ticket in their hand, they looked me fair in the eye and went: ‘It was worth it’.
“What do you do with that? They paid for the experience that they wanted with a wild dingo at the expense of that dingo. Arrogance.”
Butchulla woman and community engagement officer Tessa Waia says locals were “in tears” at the loss of a dingo this week.
“The Butchulla have been very generous [in] sharing their country with people that are respectful. It’s so disrespectful – those that do not want to heed the requests [of the people] that own and manage the country for the benefit of the next generations.”
‘We need the dingoes’
After a deadly attack on a nine-year-old in 2001, the Queensland government ordered a cull of the animals, wiping out 20 or so dingoes at random across the island. It is estimated fewer than 200 remain.
A spate of dingo attacks in 2019 saw the state roll out higher fines, and in 2021 a $2m fence stretching 7km was erected around the Orchid Beach township. Fencing is also in place around the Happy Valley and Eurong townships, as well as major camping spots.
In response to questions about a repeat cull this week, the state government was resolute: it was not an option. In the past two months they’ve euthanised two dingoes, the first since 2019.
Mansfield told reporters: “We’re not in the business of destroying animals. We’re in the business of conserving wildlife and looking after their habitat.”
Fraser Coast mayor, George Seymour, points out those two destroyed animals represent at least 1% of the island’s dingoes, gone for ever. Their future viability depends on keeping a healthy population.
Seymour says nobody locally has called for a cull, with residents aware of the small dingo population’s unbroken heritage.
“That population is a national treasure and needs to be protected and preserved. The greatest risk to it is human habituation,” he said. “You’re much more likely to be in a car accident, … eaten by a shark, [and] to drown than be attacked by a dingo.”
Cheryl Bryant from Save Fraser Island Dingoes says the government should consider capping tourist numbers during peak holiday periods to keep both dingoes and tourists safe.
“The island, the east coast, gets saturated with tourists. It’s impossible for the dingoes living in that area to avoid people,” she says.
“We need the dingoes … If it comes down to it, they’re more important than the tourists.”
As authorities continue to search for ways to ensure dingoes and tourists can coexist safely, Sinclair is reminded of the day of his dad’s greatest victory.
“When World Heritage [status] was appointed, I said to dad: ‘We’ve won, the island is going to be saved.’
“He said: ‘Nope, now we’ve got to save it from being loved to death’.”
