Reef magic: Why Bundaberg is Queensland's best-kept secret

Its innate preservation instincts immediately switch it into flight mode, the sea an irresistible siren song and we cheerlead it and its emerging brothers and sisters as they skitter down to the white wash to be swept out to deeper water.

I've only been in Bargara five minutes - dropping my luggage and coming for a dusk beach walk - when I get to witness this, just myself and another woman with her young daughter, whose face is pure awe as she watches the hatchlings make their way to the relative safety of the sea.

A small, low-rise beach town, Bargara, just 10 kilometres from Queensland's rum and sugar capital Bundaberg, is one of a string of small coastal towns that collectively make up the Coral Coast, about four hours drive, or a short flight, from Brisbane. Popular with central Queenslanders, the region has managed to remain off the radar for many holidaying Australian and international guests. Inexplicably, because not only does it have beautiful, unspoiled beaches, wholesome bucket-and-spade holiday towns like Bargara and an abundance of wildlife (both under and above the water) but the region is also far enough north to deliver the full Great Barrier Reef experience - minus the stingers and the crowds.

Here are the highlights.

Departing the tiny Bundaberg airport, flights to Lady Elliot, the most southerly of the Great Barrier Reef islands, touch down on the grassy landing strip bisecting the island, just 25 minutes later. I've lucked out and been given the co-pilot seat of the 13-seater Caravan aircraft, a position offering tourist-brochure views of the island and its ombre blue lagoon as we bank around for landing.

As famous for its birds as its marine life, there are around 200 species of sea, land and shore birds on Lady Elliot, both permanent residents and foreign visitors, from crested terns to white-capped noddies who regard us fearlessly from ramshackle nests in the pisonia trees fringing the airstrip.

The island's current custodians and committed conservationists the Gash family have continued a job begun in 1969, under the previous management, of rehabilitating the island - once stripped to its crumbling coral bones by guano mining and goats, the former used for fertiliser, the latter placed on the island to feed shipwrecked sailors.

Invasive species, the seeds carried by migrating birds, have been removed and the slowly regenerating topsoil replanted with 4000 native coral cay species. Solar power has replaced a generator and all water, including drinking water, comes from desalinated seawater processed via reverse osmosis.

There are 20 dive sites around the island with coral gardens directly off the beach, including in a shallow lagoon that is perfect for first-time snorkellers. Visitors, both day guests and those staying in the low-key eco-resort's cabins, are restricted in number and snorkel and dive groups are gratifyingly small.

A glass-bottomed boat takes us to "the lighthouse bommie" where we peer down at an oceanic rush hour - a congregation of small reef sharks, rays and turtles visiting the "cleaning station" where industrious bluestreak cleaner wrasse hoover up the parasites from their skin and out of their mouths and gills.

The water clarity around the island is astonishing, with visibility to 20 metres. I don't encounter rays while snorkelling later, but I swim through shimmering schools of silver trevally and ethereal, semi-transparent squid; spot pops of fast-moving colour darting among the coral - the deep green moon wrasse, the electric blue and yellow tail of the surgeonfish, and the distinctive orange, white and black of the Clark's anemone fish (aka "Nemo"), as well as many turtles. One as big as a toddler comes so close I'm forced to do an ungainly back-pedal with my flippers to avoid touching it.

Part of the Bunker group of islands, Lady Musgrave, a small low-lying coral cay, is a 90-minute trip on a comfortable catamaran. Unlike Lady Elliot, there's no resort on the 19-hectare island but you can camp (when it's not turtle season) or also sleep over the reef. As we tie up to the three-storey pontoon moored just off the island, the overnight guests have just vacated their beds in glamping tents around the end of the platform, just crumpled linen sheets suggesting their recent occupancy. I can only imagine what it must be like to be out here once the daytrippers have gone - sleeping under a star-spangled sky, lulled to sleep by the sea.

I'm just here for the day though and eager to get under the water. First we view it from a glass-bottomed boat which glides over the shallow reefs to the island. A marine biologist walks us through the pisonia forest, past pandanus and sandpaper figs full of nesting noddy terns to a beach that looks like a film set. Surrounding the island is more than 1000 hectares of lagoon, the Great Barrier Reef's largest - the white tips of waves breaking on the reef just visible in the far distance.

Back on the pontoon, we don snorkel and flippers and slip into the temperate water, while those doing scuba suit up. There are an astounding 1600 species of fish in the reef surrounding the island and more than 200 species of hard and soft coral. The current is gentle and drifts us over gardens layered with boulder, staghorn and plate coral, waving anemones and purple bouquets of soft coral. Fat, slug-like sea cucumbers inhabit the sandy patches between coral bommies and turtles swim languidly along, seemingly unbothered by our presence. Thanks to an onboard talk by the marine biologist, I'm able to recognise trigger, butterfly and angel fish, as well as my favourite, the parrot fish with its rainbow livery.

"It feels like swimming in a giant aquarium," laughs a guest, sitting on the platform step, mask pushed up, legs dangling in the water. "Actually, I have also been to the reef from Cairns and I prefer it here," she says, and slides back into the water.

Mon Repos Beach, just north of Bargara, is the nesting place of the largest concentration of endangered loggerhead turtles in the South Pacific. On reaching maturity at between 30 and 35 years, the turtles return to their birthplace to nest each year, between November and March.

On a previous visit to the Mon Repos Turtle Experience, I'd been privileged to see a female turtle laboriously heaving herself up the beach to dig a nest above the tide line and lay a prodigious clutch of eggs.

The centre has been rebuilt since my last visit. Set back a good distance from the beach, surrounded by vegetation, its architecture is specifically designed to contain rather than spill light which might be seen from the beach and disorientate the turtles. It's a precision-run operation where research with the goal of increasing the declining turtle numbers is supported by scientists and volunteers, many of whom, like the turtles themselves, return year after year.

Tours are run at night, when the turtles either come to lay or the nests hatch. We wait in an assigned group in the centre until activity has been seen on the beach and are summoned by the ranger. Torches pointed at the ground, we follow her along the unlit path though thickets of coastal sheoaks and melaleuca to low dunes where we gather around a low temporary fence protecting a nest, which is currently erupting with hatchlings impatient to get to their oceanic home.

"Only one in a thousand turtle babies makes it to maturity," the ranger tells us while holding a furiously flapping example for us all to see. "And the biggest issue now is climate change." A turtle's sex, she says, is determined by the temperature of the sand in which the eggs are laid and an ever-decreasing number of males are being born.

Under instruction from the ranger, a lucky few are told to form a line to the sea, legs akimbo as if they're about to play tunnel ball. Their job is to shine low-light torches at the turtles to guide them to the water, where they will hopefully live out long lives and return here one day to lay their own eggs.

Surprisingly, it is the freshwater turtle "Milbi" rather than the sea turtle that is the totem of the traditional owners of the region. A newish tour, run by the Taribelang Bunda people, aims to educate visitors in the rich Indigenous history of the area.

At The Hummock, the only rise of land in this flat landscape east of Bundaberg, patchworked with green fields and rich red earth, our guide Waszie tells us about how the wood for boomerangs is sourced, and how different groups would meet to exchange items. We all have varying measures of success when we're invited to have a go at the bull roarer, a wooden instrument whirled in rapid circles on a string above the head, whose eerie sound carries far, emanating a warning that men's business is taking place and to keep away.

Part of the region's dark past, Waszie also touches on use of indentured South Pacific workers, known as "Kanakas", pointing out the poignant remnants of their unpaid labour, the black lava rock walls, built by hand as they cleared fields for sugar cane. We also hear about an horrific massacre on Paddy's Island in the Burnett River in the 19th century, remembered in a striking panel of artworks on the facade of the Indigenous medical centre.

It's not all sombre, however; we also learn place names and about bush tucker and medicinal plants, tradition, totems and the methods the Taribelang Bunda used to care for country. There's also a delicious morning tea of damper, lilly-pilly and lemon myrtle jam.

I frequently pull off the road to take photos of the sugar cane fields. With a backdrop of clear blue or rose-tinted sunset sky, they are incredibly evocative and so quintessentially Queensland.

Sugar has a long history in the region and as plantings of cane grew, so did a side industry - rum, made from the sticky black molasses waste from sugar processing. The first bottle rolled off the Bundaberg Rum production line in 1889, and so the town of Bundaberg became famous for the spirit.

While it may be difficult to dissociate Bundaberg from rum, the product is gradually distancing itself from its louche reputation, thanks to the efforts of the distillery's head of rum blending and innovation, Sarah Watson (who ironically grew up surrounded by whisky distilleries in her native Scotland) and her small-batch Master Distillers collection.

Even if, like me, you're not much of a rum drinker, the spirit is deeply connected to Australia's colonial history and Bundaberg Rum has a fascinating museum. In the blending room, under expert guidance, you can also have a go at blending your own, from rum aged in sherry, scotch, port and bourbon barrels, with two bottles of your personal blend to take home. You may also take away a new appreciation for the oft-maligned dark spirit.

If rum's really not your drink, however, a tour of Kalki Moon distillery may be more to your taste. Under owner and former Bundaberg Rum master distiller Rick Prosser, the distillery produces a range of awarded gins, vodka and liqueurs.

Just inland from the Coral Sea, the land is patchworked with fields. The clement climate and volcanically enriched red soil mean the region boasts some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country, producing everything from tomatoes, sweet potato, ginger and avocados, to exotic fruit such as dragon fruit and lychees.

It's also now the fastest-growing macadamia region in Australia. At the new, purpose-built Macadamias Australia, I join a tour to see the process from tree to packet, watching the nuts being enrobed in chocolate and tasting my way through a range that also includes lemon myrtle and honey roasted nuts. In the Orchard Cafe, overlooking the trees, I make short shrift of a slice of superb key lime macadamia tart, despite vowing to "only have a taste".

At Tinaberries, not only is the farm Instagram-gorgeous and the strawberry ice-cream a rite of passage, but the strawberries, big and ruby-red all the way through, are probably the best you'll ever eat.

There are plenty of farm shops like The Red Shed and Alloway Farm to stock up on fresh produce, as well as ad hoc roadside stalls, selling everything from sweet potatoes to lychees.

Each year, in winter, when the crisp mornings warm into blue-sky days, the town hosts Taste Bundaberg, a 10-day festival celebrating local produce and producers. There are food markets, tours, long lunches and dinners, demonstrations and guest celebrity chefs at venues all across the Bundaberg region. It's highly popular, with tickets selling almost as soon as they're released. This year's festival runs from August 4-13.

I've made multiple visits here and, as I leave for the short flight back to Brisbane, already planning the next, I am as ever perplexed as to why this nature-blessed region has managed to stay a secret for so long, while being simultaneously grateful that it has.

Natascha Mirosch travelled courtesy of Bundaberg Tourism

Just 15 minutes from downtown Bundaberg are pristine, undeveloped and uncrowded beaches. An 11 kilometre trail, including a pandanus-shaded boardwalk with drinking fountains, barbecues and playgrounds, runs parallel to the beaches, from Kellys to Burnett Heads - perfect for bike riding or a walk.

Elliott Heads: This stunning sweep of silver sand is a favourite of kite surfers and surfers, but there's also good swimming at the more sheltered Elliott River end. You can also cross to Dr May's Island at low tide to bathe in the huge rockpools. The island is off-limits during bird nesting season between September and May.

Kellys Beach: A patrolled beach, Kellys is a favourite of both locals and visitors. It has a wide, calm and shallow swimming bay at its northern end known as "The Basin", ideal for pre-reef snorkelling practice. There are plenty of small colourful fish around the rocks and you may be lucky enough to see a turtle in season.

Bargara Beach: The "town" beach has shade, grassed areas and playgrounds as well as a couple of laid-back cafes across the road, making it perfect for a pre-breakfast swim.

Nielson Park Beach: Home to the Surf Club, Nielson's is a beautiful long swathe of open beach with medium-sized waves ideal for learner-surfers and swimmers.

Mon Repos Beach: Backed by low dunes and natural coastal bushland, Mon Repos is six kilometres of golden sand, punctuated by clusters of local black basalt. Due to the turtle nesting season, it's off-limits 6pm-6am between October and April.

Oaks Beach: A small, beach fronting a family-friendly parklands, Oaks Beach, with its small swell, is good for swimming, snorkelling or beginner surfing and is patrolled during peak season.

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