Great Keppel Island Token

I'm from Queensland, AUstralia, and my uncle's family lives in Rockhampton, which is the nearesy large city to this island. I went there as a child.

The island's tourist resort has had a chequered history. It started out as a family-friendly day-trip destination, with regular catamaran ferries from Yeppoon. Then the resort was sold in 2002 and the marketing shifted, with risque advertisements aiming to rebrand the island as a young singles hotspot and preferring longer-stay visitors to day-trippers. Then the resort was effectively abandoned after another batch of new owners failed to maintain it. It is now a luxury camping destination, with the former resort mostly in ruins and minimal tourist facilities for visitors.

However, I'm not familiar with this specific token. I can be confident in saying your token dates from the "family-friendly" time of the resort, in the 1970s and 1980s. The art style seems to match that era. This website has a postcard dating from the mid-1970s showing the resort's pool with the same island-and-palm-tree logo painted on the floor of it.

I'm actually about 30 minutes drive from there, I often bust in there and take have a look around, it's very over grown like a jungle these days, however the Japanese restaurant still operates and there is a servo sorta thing and s block of flats the "caretaker" lives in. However most things are still there, paintings on the walls and beds are all still in place. I haven't been to go through many building yet, hard to get to.

As for your token... I've asked about everyone there is to ask, all I could think of was a towel token cause it's pladtic and the towels whee notoriously hard to acquire there unless you where a guest. But 60% of them just there for the day out. So they tried hard to keep the guests and day scabs identified. But somebody said maybe it was entry to the nightclub for guests staying, oh and someone said for the ferry, which is a good guess.

However looking at a nearby place called cocos which they had a relationship with, the QLD really pumped and promoted tourism with the place back in the day, they had these tokens to use for in house currency. Could be related, but I would have guessed your token is from the nineties not sixties .