From the interwar years, Green Island – a coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef – came to feature in Australia’s bourgeoning commercial print culture, both as place of remote, natural beauty and as an increasingly affordable holiday destination for middle and working-class Australians. For writers like Vance and Nettie Palmer, Jean Devanny, Frank Dalby Davison and Brooke Nicholls, Green Island offered a kind of Thoreauvian retreat from their busy literary and political lives. Davison explained that, on the island, he enjoyed ‘a contented citizenship of this unspoiled fragment of loveliness’. In reality, when Davison visited in the mid-1930s, Green Island was already teeming with boatloads of day-tripping tourists. By the 1950s and 1960s the island was a playground for prosperous postwar Australians. Novels, natural histories, travel books and tourist literature demonstrate the historical tension between Green Island’s natural value and its commercial value to Australia’s print and tourist industries. While this is a history of a small place – a fifteen-hectare island – it speaks to broader international themes, especially the simultaneous rise of tourism and environmental concern in the Western world across the twentieth century and, of course, the current environmentally precarious position of the Great Barrier Reef.