This location in sunny Queensland is like nowhere else

In the middle of nowhere. It's a description that's probably guaranteed to offend a place but intrigue curious travellers. The "nowhere" I've arrived at hides between Bundaberg and Gladstone on that rare thing, an unsung stretch of Queensland coast.

A chaos of red-tailed black cockatoos is skylarking like loons above the beach, all squawk and raucous gossip. Inland, pandanus alleys and paperbark cathedrals frame the mirror waters of a "creek" so wide it would be a river anywhere else. The trevally and mangrove jack are always biting here. (If not today then surely tomorrow). Meanwhile, I can watch the sun at the foot of my bed levitating out of the Coral Sea.

All this happens at Rules Beach, about 90 minutes' drive on sealed roads from either Bundaberg or Gladstone. My three-room glamping tent at the very new Rules Beachfront Holiday Park is a high-tech canvas cabin rather than a tricked-up canopy with status aspirations. Sitting on a broad timber deck, the beautifully appointed 40-square-metre structure includes a walled kitchen and bathroom, plus a living-sleeping room that faces the sea.

There's a huge egg-shaped outdoor bath-tub beside my deck, but the best wake-up dunk is in the ocean 150 metres away, where a morning body surf session sets-up your day heroically. The water averages 20-degrees. No stingers. No snap-happy crocs. In fact, the list of what Rules Beach "lacks" - tower blocks, overshadows, shopping mall, honking crowds and parking snarls - proposes a glorious paradox: each minus here is a plus.

Behind its 300 metres of beachfront and the glamping tents, the six-hectare holiday park accommodates powered sites for vans and tents, along with a giant (and impeccably clean) common kitchen building, kids' zone and facilities block. You could hang here all day, between barbecues, beach fishing and siestas, or go exploring the extraordinary hinterland.

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For good reason this area is called the Discovery Coast. It helps to have a four-wheel drive for exploring the sand tracks and beaches of Deepwater National Park. Even better is to have a longtime local like Julie Bannister take the wheel as she shows me the park's melaleuca forests, hoop pine, towering pandanus and the tannin-dark pools of Deepwater Creek. Echidna, wombat and water monitors make brief, surprise appearances. An old man emu struts across the track with a string of chicks lollygagging behind.

And it all smells so good. The forest air has this subtle waft, an on-the-tip-of-your-tongue citrus tang, not quite nameable but intriguingly present. We rumble through the furrowed tracks and she-oak groves to pop out on a road that leads north to Agnes Water - "the Big Smoke", for rural-dwelling Julie. With coffee shops, supermarkets, an excellent museum, yachts, apartments and RV rigs towing carapace vans the size of a condo, I know what she means.

We roll on another 10 clicks to the eponymous settlement of 1770, "The Birthplace of Queensland," according to a monument plaque on the headland. On May 24, 1770, James Cook, Joseph Banks and about 50 proto-Pom tourists came ashore here, thus becoming "the first British feet that ever trod [Queensland] soil".

"Except he wouldn't have," says a passing local as he points eastwards around the cape. "Cook was too good a seaman to ever have beached on rocks. He'd have rowed round the corner and put ashore in the bay." He wanders off, tossing a sceptical side-eye at the plaque.

Meanwhile, back at Rules, aka "no-rules", Beach, the evening barbecues are sizzling and I read-up on history, notably of nearby Baffle Creek, one of Queensland's last wild rivers. As part of a 120-kilometre system that winds down from the Great Divide, it has never been dammed or industrialised.

The Baffle wasn't named to honour some Flashman-era Colonel Blimp or even a bewhiskered colonial explorer. In 1853, a local squatter and his cronies were "pursuing some blacks for a crime they had committed on his property". As we know, events like this usually ended shamefully. The Aborigines, however, simply disappeared amid the creekside scrub and could not be found. Defeated, the squatter declared, "We are baffled. We will name it Baffle Creek."

I'm up early to meet fishing champion "Lucky Luke" Tinson. A white-bellied sea eagle watches from a precarious nest as we cruise the silent creek in his five-metre Tomahawk runabout. There are mangrove shores and clearings, a snoozing village, a farm here, a holiday shack with thunderbox there, and soon we're negotiating the maze of shifting sandbars that leads to the sea. The estuary is almost a kilometre wide at the mouth. Some "creek".

Our fishing rods are soon out, with their glittering lures set to entice barra, mackeral and jacks to their fate: a barbecue. We trawl, yarn, listen to music, head out past the bar, trawl some more and stay hydrated - in short, do everything but catch fish.

I should have warned Luke that I'm the kiss of death when it comes to luck in piscatorial pursuits. "There's a good reason why it's called fishing, not catching," he says philosophically.

Any day that's a bad one for fishing is a great one for the fish. Instead, we turn inland, upriver towards something magical, the lost world of Baffle Creek.

Green islands rise to form everglades-like channels. Walls of melaleuca shade the banks. Luke has seen kangaroos here, swimming from island to island.

Forget angling. This is one of the world's beautiful "nowheres" - unsung and un-stuffed.

Where: Rules Beachfront Holiday Park, 90 kilometres north of Bundaberg, features glamping tents with ensuites, kitchenettes, king-sized beds and air-conditioning.

How much: From $275 to $350 a night per couple (no kids or pets). Or a single parent plus child. Minimum two nights in off-peak season, and four nights during peak. Look for specials.

While there: Lucky Luke's half-day fishing charters are $250 a person. luketinson.1980@gmail.com.

Explore more: rulesbeach.com.au

The writer travelled courtesy of Rules Beachfront Holiday Park.