Kerry Outerbridge motored his powerboat through coral reef ringing the lush, tropical island and alighted upon white sand.

Catamarans and jetskis lay strewn about the beach. Nothing but quiet emerged to greet him from the bungalows scattered among a grove of coconut trees. A plate of food sat on a kitchen table, mouldering.

“It was as if everybody packed up and left overnight,” he says.

Outerbridge last visited Brampton Island in 2022 and the abandoned resort has since deteriorated even more. But once it was one of the jewels in the crown of Australia’s tourism offerings; one of dozens of pristine island playgrounds dotted through the Great Barrier Reef.

This week Tourism and Events Queensland launched a campaign to attract domestic tourists whose international winter travel plans have been iced by unrest abroad.

The poster image for a slick minute-long campaign video is a famous love heart-shaped coral reef, about 115km north of Brampton.

With its tale of desertion and dilapidation, Brampton, one of the southernmost islands in the Whitsundays, is far from unique.

At least six Great Barrier Reef island resorts have been abandoned to the mercy of the salty and tropical air, years after being smashed by what a state parliamentary inquiry described as a “series of extreme weather events”. Brampton’s resort was one of several closed after Cyclone Yasi hit in 2011.

But it is not just cyclones wreaking havoc upon tourism in north Queensland. Visitors are choosing to fly to cheaper holiday destinations in Asia or to go on cruises. The inquiry also heard that investors were seeking to “land bank” resorts without bothering to operate them.

The soaring cost of diesel used to reach and often power these resorts and skyrocketing insurance costs driven by climate crisis only add to this trouble in paradise.

Most of the island resorts are built on land owned by the state and leased to tourism operators. Brampton resort’s present head lessee, United Petroleum, responded to the damage wrought by Yasi with a redevelopment plan for a “world-class 7-star resort”, opting to reduce guest numbers from 210 to 35 in an attempt to capture high-end clientele.

Mackay council approved those plans in 2015. Ten years later United Petroleum sought another five-year extension to begin Brampton’s revamp. That request remains under review.

Guardian Australia understands that the Queensland government is bringing action in the land court to try to force the restoration – or sale – of the resort.

Unpaved paradise

Outerbridge first visited Brampton with his wife and kids in the 1980s – a heyday for the resort captured in an 11-minute-long ad that includes a couple playing tennis with oversized rackets and dancing in a poky nightclub.

Hence his anger at the resort’s 15-year desertion.

His own island home of Keswick, just 7km south, is the site of a long-promised resort that was never built.

That tourism lease was granted in 1996. The pitch sold the dream of a resort supported by a rare residential population on a barrier reef island.

Residents, tourists and staff would be able to access Keswick using a resort marina. More than 130 subleases were created, to be sold and developed into homes.

Thirty years on, the resort exists on paper only. Just 23 houses have been built. There are no shops or facilities. Transport to the island still requires a skiff and a wade through the surf – or the charter of a small plane.

Keswick’s residential population – mainly of retirees – fluctuates between about 10 and 18.

Some, including Outerbridge, don’t mind the lack of development. Instead of sharing his paradise with neighbours who never materialised, the 82-year-old semi-retired orthopaedic surgeon has a house sitting at the end of a cul de sac, surrounded by forest.

“I like my solitude,” he says.

But while seclusion may suit Outerbridge, the Queensland government is taking steps that it hopes will prevent future resorts from languishing unbuilt or being left in disrepair.

Resort owners ‘on notice’

There are models for success. The best known is slightly farther north: Hamilton Island, with its commercial airport, permanent population of about 1,500 people, high-rise apartments, supermarket and golf course. It sold to a US private equity firm for the reported figure of $1.2bn in December.

More than 700km farther north, Lizard Island is home to an Australian Museum research station and a luxury resort owned by Australia’s third richest person, the mining magnate Andrew Forrest.

After the Queensland parliamentary inquiry handed down its report on reef island resorts in 2023, the then Labor government backed its recommendation to force anyone holding a resort lease to “use it or lose it”.

Six tourism leases on Great Keppel Island were forfeited in April 2023 and, in June 2024, the owner of a derelict resort of Double Island, near Cairns, was stripped of the lease.

The action, designed to put resort owners “on notice”, prompted at least two abandoned resorts to be put on the market.

The natural resources minister, Dale Last, insists the Liberal National government is more intent on pursuing this agenda than its predecessor.

“Islands that were once the jewels in the crown of Queensland’s tourism industry were left to deteriorate for the best part of a decade,” he tells Guardian Australia.

“The Crisafulli Government is in the final stages of negotiations with a proponent to secure an exciting future for Double Island and I look forward to providing more details on that in the coming weeks.”

But there will be no quick fixes. South Molle was listed for sale last June, Keswick not long after. Neither has found a buyer.

Elsewhere there are signs of renewal. This week the Mackay council voted in favour of a plan to transform the derelict Club Med resort on Lindeman into a five-star eco-luxury resort, at a cost of $583m.

Restoration has begun on Dunk Island, one of the few on freehold leases, which was bought by the billionaire Annie Cannon-Brookes in 2022 for $24m.

The new owners on Hook Island, abandoned for more than a decade, have announced plans to open an eco-luxury resort next year.

And, rather than dreaming of restoring past glory, others are advocating for a future with a lighter footprint.

The Griffith University tourism professor Daniel Gschwind says the Great Barrier Reef islands have held a “special allure”.

“There’s a romanticism associated with islands,” says Gschwind, who was the chief executive of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council from 2001 to 2022.

He says the reef itself has been Australia’s greatest natural tourism asset and the islands “have a bright future ahead” – one that involves far more diverse offerings than, say, the 1980s, a period during which one resort island promoted itself as a place to “get wrecked”.

“We very often put a nostalgic gloss on the past,” he says.

He points to the development of a commercial multi-day hiking trail through Whitsunday Island, investment in the existing Hinchinbrook track and the emergence of glamping-type accommodation.

But the focus on regenerative tourism, Gschwind says, cannot obscure the damage that climate crisis is wreaking upon the reef itself. Damage that experts describe as an existential danger.

“We have to tell the right story, so expectations of visitors are in the right place,” Gschwind says. “We have to tell the real story of the reef.”