Jimmy Barnes is waving down to us seated fans from the restaurant balcony here on Daydream Island. “I feel like one of those grumpy old Muppets, way up here. Probably look like one too.”

We laugh, then cheer as Jimmy encourages a cute toddler, presumably a member of the extended Barnes clan, to wave as well.

Minutes later Jimmy’s on stage, wife Jane and daughter Mahalia singing backing vocals. “Let’s have Mossy join us for a couple of songs.” When he and guitarist Ian Moss rip through Cold Chisel classics “Khe San” and “Goodbye Astrid” to finish, I’m a pig in mud.

In 2013, Music in Paradise co-founder (with wife Marie) Jamie Gray invited surfer-musician Donavon Frankenreiter to visit the Maldives, where Jamie and Marie, both Australians, already ran surf retreats. Donavon played three shows, surfed his socks off, and MIP was away. When Covid forced travel businesses to look at domestic options, Music in Paradise, which links music performances with a beach-side location, found its feet in the Whitsundays.

I’m in a standard room but it’s huge and airy, legacy of when it was built (1990) and resort rooms were big. The entire place was renovated (reopened June 2019), so the bathroom, bed and furnishings are fairly new. My package includes five nights’ accommodation, shows and buffet breakfast, with other meals and drinks extra. All MIP venues are family-friendly, thanks to the myriad day-time activities on offer, but it’s kid-free music nostalgia couples I’m surrounded by.

We have three sunset gigs to come (Ian Moss, Kate Ceberano, The Black Sorrows), but daytimes are free. Though it’s winter, I’m in the nineteen-degree ocean every day for a swim or snorkel. Besides jet-skis and kayaks, Daydream has two historical anachronisms going for it: dozens of free-range wallaroos, descendants of former residents of the island’s long-forgotten petting zoo, and the Living Reef with its Underwater Observatory.

Not every island in the Whitsundays has this, so I take full advantage, fronting up for reef presentations and fish-feeding, which features three mangrove stingrays, plus “Doug”, the female shovel-nose ray, and four black-tip reef sharks, gliding amid the corals on constant patrol. Doug is one of two endangered shovel-nose rays worldwide to have bred in captivity, and it’s heartening to see her three energetic pups, kept safe in their shallow pool next door.

Viewable through the Underwater Observatory window are a silver trevally, dozens of bicolour “Chromis”, three Moorish Idols, their elongated dorsal wands streaming in the underwater breeze, a pair of colourful striped parrotfish, a triggerfish. The bad news comes when marine experts start up about rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, coral bleaching. I admire them though: faced with sunny, unsuspecting holidaymakers, they stick to a grim and truthful script.

When Ian Moss takes to the stage, he plays solo on a Maton acoustic.

Mossy is my hero, inspired me to learn guitar when I was aged fifteen, so it’s unlikely you’ll get anything level-headed from me about tonight’s set. There are Cold Chisel classics (“Choir Girl”, “My Baby”, “When the War is Over”), his own solo hits (“Tucker’s Daughter”), and he closes with “Bow River”, a Chisel song he wrote. I’m tempted to plug his 2023 album, “Rivers Run Dry”, which includes songwriting contributions from Aussie music legends Don Walker, Troy Cassar-Daley, and Mark Lizotte (“Diesel”).

Mossy still plays like a demon and sings like an angel. Australia is lucky to have him.

Sunset the following evening it’s Kate Ceberano’s turn, and she’s a revelation.

The pristine power of her voice is stunning, especially if, like me, you’ve not heard it for a while. Along with a couple of her early hits, we get “Everything’s Alright” and “I don’t Know How to Love Him”, from her role as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Kate is engaged with the crowd and the crowd loves her. “My dad is Hawaiian”, she reminds us. “When he came to Australia, he brought with him a surfboard and a ukelele. I mean, imagine!” Then, “I was lucky to sing with the late great Chrissy Amphlett,, before her band launches into a cover of the Divinyls’ “Boys in Town”. The gig wraps up with an extended reggae jam, which has us all mimic The Police’s call-and-response from “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”.

During the after-dinner starlight stroll back to my room, (which beats the Uber scramble when you leave a packed pub after a show), the wallaroos are out and about, grazing. Their king, Kevin, scruffy and haggard these days, is still, according to island staff, fathering offspring well into his thirties. A security guard is getting nowhere in a weary stand-off with Kevin, who lopes into the resort reception building now and then, remind everyone who’s boss.

On our last evening, I’m the lone male perched at the front of the stage together with twenty excited middle-aged (and older) women.

I haven’t seen the Black Sorrows live in thirty years, but they were hugely entertaining back then, and when Joe Camilleri leads them on, I’m barely two metres from the band.

Though Joe is now aged seventy-five, he blows a mean saxophone and clearly still loves to sing and perform. Their set is eighty-minutes, with hits including “Harley and Rose”, “Daughters of Glory” and “Hold on to Me”. They even pull out a couple of crowd-pleasing songs from Camilleri’s early days with Jo Jo Zep & the Falcons – “Hit and Run” being a perfect beachside island choice for its joyous reggae feel and powerhouse saxophone riff.

An MIP artist line-up is always likely to target a baby-boomer generation, those with time and money to spend. “But surfing will always be heart-and-soul of what we do”, says Jamie. The Maldives remains the company’s spiritual home, but they’ve spread their wings to include Australian locations like the Whitsundays, which reminds us all, it is an amazing natural world.

Holiday somewhere you like, see a band or songwriter you like. A winning formula.

The writer was a guest of Music in Paradise.