Maggie is small and easy to love - roughly seven kilometres by five, with over half its area set aside as national park. The shape of it is unmistakable from the water: rounded grey granite tumbled into great stacks and tors, with dark hoop pines clinging to the slopes between them and the bush a dusty green that turns gold in the late light. Some twenty-five kilometres of walking tracks thread the interior and the headlands, linking a coastline that crinkles into beach after beach and a string of little bays. This was always a place of resources as well as beauty. As Townsville grew through the 19th century, the island gave up its hoop pine for timber and its granite for stone - rock quarried here helped reclaim land for the Port of Townsville and went into the city's Customs House. The hills you walk through carry that history in their scars.

The island's most famous residents are not, strictly speaking, locals by birth. Koalas were brought to Magnetic Island in the 1930s, moved here to give them a refuge from the pressures they faced on the mainland - and they took to the place completely. The island now supports one of the largest wild koala populations in Australia, thriving in the abundant gums with no shortage of food and few of the dangers they had fled. Walk the ridges of the national park, especially the popular Forts Walk, and patience is usually rewarded: a grey bundle wedged in a high fork, dozing through the heat of the day, occasionally cracking open one eye. They share the island with rock-wallabies that pick their way over the boulders at dusk, with kookaburras and sulphur-crested cockatoos, and with the curlews whose eerie night calls carry across the bays.

About two thousand people live on Maggie, spread among four small bayside villages strung up the sheltered east coast while the rugged west stays wild as park. From south to north they run Picnic Bay, Nelly Bay, Arcadia and Horseshoe Bay, each with its own character. Nelly Bay holds the ferry terminal and the newer waterfront development; Arcadia and Horseshoe lean easy and casual, the kind of places built around a pub, a stretch of sand and the rhythm of the tide. The island has good sealed roads, though a few rough tracks still ask for a four-wheel drive, and getting around by hired car, the local bus, or one of the open-sided minimokes is half the fun. What it does not have is hurry. This is a holiday island and a working island suburb of Townsville at once, and its pleasures are simple: a walk, a swim, a beer at sunset, the next bay over.

Maggie sits at the inshore edge of the Great Barrier Reef, and the water is the point as much as the land. Sailing tours work out of Nelly Bay Harbour and Horseshoe Bay; sea kayaks slip around the headlands into coves you cannot reach on foot; and dive and snorkel trips run out to fringing reef and to the wider reef beyond. There is even history beneath the surface here, the bays holding their own quiet stories. Getting to the island is part of its appeal - it can only be reached by boat, a half-hour ferry across the strait from Townsville eight kilometres away, the granite hills swelling steadily larger as you cross. For the Wulgurukaba, that crossing is older than any timetable, a journey their ancestors made by canoe between island and mainland for countless generations, following the path Gabul took when he shaped this whole stretch of coast and chose, in the end, to stop here.