For nearly twenty years, the only Club Med village in Australia stood on a small island at the southern end of the Whitsundays, its pools and bungalows tucked beneath a green hill called Mount Oldfield. Then, at the end of January 2012, in the unsettled wake of Cyclone Yasi, the resort closed its doors - and stayed closed. For more than a decade Lindeman Island sat empty, changing hands between owners with grand plans and shallow follow-through, a tropical resort slowly being reclaimed by the bush. The hill remained. The reef remained. The guests did not return for a very long time.
Lindeman is not really an island in the old geological sense - it is the top of a mountain that drowned. The Whitsundays were once a coastal range, and when sea levels rose after the last ice age the water flooded the valleys and left the peaks standing as islands. Climb the track to the summit of Mount Oldfield, 212 metres up, and on a clear day the whole drowned landscape spreads out around you: Hamilton Island, the Haslewood group, and the scattered green humps of the Whitsundays stretching to the horizon. You are standing on the high ground of a range that the ocean came up to meet.
Long before any resort, these were the waters of the Ngaro people, among the oldest seafaring cultures known in Australia. They moved between these islands in bark canoes, fishing the reefs and channels, and they were on Lindeman when the first Europeans arrived. The history that followed was harsh: settlers grazed sheep and ran a small visitor lodge, and the Ngaro who remained worked on an island that had been theirs outright. Their long presence in these waters is not a footnote to the resort story - it is the deeper story, stretching back thousands of years before the first holidaymaker ever set foot on the sand.
The modern island was largely the work of aviation. Before the Second World War ended, the airline pioneer Reg Ansett saw the tourist potential of these islands, and in the 1950s flying boats began landing passengers on the water at Lindeman and nearby resorts. When Ansett opened the Whitsunday Coast Airport in 1957, the islands grew suddenly reachable, and Lindeman passed through a string of owners - a shipping line, a state insurance office, an airline - before Club Med arrived in 1992 and turned it into the company's only Australian village. For two decades it ran as a self-contained holiday world, its own airstrip ferrying guests in over the reef.
Cyclone Yasi was the turning point. The resort shut in early 2012, and three months later a Chinese firm bought the island for twelve million dollars - a low price, because the place needed everything. Ambitious plans followed: three luxury resorts, a safe harbour for fifty boats, villas and a village. Almost none of it was built. The project bogged down, the owners sold at a loss to a Singapore family in early 2023, and Lindeman remained a beautiful problem - too remote and too damaged to revive easily, too valuable to abandon. Only recently has a serious new redevelopment begun to take shape, promising at last to reopen an island that spent a decade waiting.
Strip away the buildings and what remains is the reason anyone built here in the first place. Most of Lindeman lies within the Lindeman Islands National Park, which protects the island along with thirteen others in the group, and the bush and beaches outlast every change of ownership. Grassy slopes give way to pockets of forest; the track to Mount Oldfield is still there for anyone who lands; and offshore the fringing reefs of the southern Whitsundays carry on as they have for millennia. Through all the years of empty bungalows and stalled blueprints, the island kept being an island - its butterflies, its birdsong, its quiet bays indifferent to whether a resort happened to be open.
Lindeman Island lies at 20.45 degrees south, 149.03 degrees east, at the southern end of the Whitsunday Islands in the Coral Sea. From the air it is a distinct forested island crowned by Mount Oldfield at 212 m, with a former resort and a small airstrip on its lower ground - a useful visual waypoint amid the scatter of southern Whitsunday islands. Hamilton Island and its airport (YBHM / HTI) lie close by to the north and are the nearest major airfield; Whitsunday Coast Airport at Proserpine (YBPN / PPP) is on the mainland to the west-northwest. Recommended viewing altitude is 2,000 to 4,000 ft to take in the surrounding islands and reef. Expect sea breezes, strong trade winds through the channels, and building cloud over the islands on humid afternoons.