When you live alone on a remote island, with crocodiles and dingoes as neighbours and the occasional visit from a cyclone, existence is how you frame it.

There are no "problems or issues" on Far North Queensland's Restoration Island, where former millionaire David Glasheen is the sole resident — just "character-building opportunities".

"You've got to think on the positive side all the time or you go crazy because things get really, really character building. They push you. Things go wrong," David says.

Sorry, this audio has expired Hear more from David Glasheen speaking about life on Restoration Island.

"Wrong" could mean crocs in the tinny when you wake in the morning.

It could mean an extreme weather event endured in a shack.

Glasheen has befriended local trawlers, with whom he shares his homebrew beer. ( Supplied )

Or it could mean falling and breaking your hip, well out of reach of a satellite phone that works some weeks, and other times merely serves as a prop.

David is about to turn 76, and says the hip-break, earlier this year, nearly finished him.

"It's lucky the damn phone was going or I'd be dead," he says.

'Born again by being up here'

David hasn't always lived like this.

In his earlier life he lived in Sydney where he built a multi-million-dollar mining company.

But he lost most of his family's wealth, around $37 million today, in the stock market crash of 1987.

David Glasheen (far right) in his former life as a business mogul, at an international trade fair in Kuwait. ( Supplied )

Shortly after, his marriage broke down. He was "wounded, seriously wounded".

He arrived on Restoration Island after hearing about it through a friend — and never left.

He says his 22 years on the island have repaired him.

"We all need restoration at some point in our lives and that's what's happened to me ... I'm mentally supercharged," says David, who has written about his life in The Millionaire Castaway.

Dingoes can spot a friend from foe, says Glasheen, who considers them great company on the island. ( Supplied: Aubrey Comben )

And he needs to be.

The ability to cleverly manage danger is essential to David's life.

"[Risk] is at the forefront of your brain. You're well aware of things," he says.

"You've heard the saying 'measure twice, cut once'. Well, you measure five times, cut once up where I am.

"You can't afford to make errors."

When David broke his hip it took him an excruciating hour to drag himself 60 metres to the phone.

Even so, the prospect of remaining here another couple of decades, and being in his 90s and alone on a remote island, elicits no fear.

Glasheen says his sense of smell and sight have noticeably improved since moving to the island. ( Supplied )

He's says he'll see out his final days on Restoration Island.

"I live in heaven — why would you leave heaven?" he says.

"I'm literally born again by being up here."

Senses changed by life on the island

David says he's not just mentally but physically altered by living on Restoration Island.

He remembers first arriving in Cape York and noticing local Aboriginal people were "way more attuned to anything out there than city people".

"The Aboriginal kids would be spearing diamond mullet that I couldn't see in the water. They'd spear them, 10 out of 10, all the time," he says.

"I would wave at someone opposite the beach and I had to use binoculars, and she's just waving back at me, so that's how good her eyesight is compared to mine."

Over the decades, his own senses have developed.

When he fishes, he notices "signs that there's action in the water".

"I can see it if anything moves in the bush or on the water, that other people can't see. It wasn't [like that] when I first arrived," he says.

And the darkness is less empty than it once was.

"I can wander round most nights and know what I'm doing. Your senses soon pick it up when you've got no light and you've got to see in the dark," he says.

A 'pretty exciting' annual shop

David starts every day with a coffee — by percolator on a gas camping-style stove-top, if he's got "real coffee"; otherwise, it's instant.

"It's the only thing I do that's regular," he says.

Breakfast is often muesli with fruit. David grows pawpaw and mango, and about four native fruit trees, including the wongai, a native plum.

Homegrown veggies and fresh fish comprise a typical lunch for Glasheen. ( Supplied )

Lunch, his only other meal of the day, could be fish and rice, some veggies from the garden, or seafood from his trawler mates.

David fishes with handlines, but has also developed good relationships with "the trawler boys", commercial fishers who sail the area from March till December.

Trading's not allowed, but gifting is.

David gifts the fishers some of his homebrew beer and they gift him some of their seafood.

They also provide company and regularly stop over for a few days for barbeques on the island.

"These are friends," says David.

"We know each other well and we respect each other's roles in life."

Locals from Lockhart, a small town 40 kilometres away, volunteer farmers and celebrity passers-by like Dick Smith or Russell Crowe have also, over the years, provided company.

Once a year, David heads to Cairns to load up a trawler with a top-up of supplies.

Describing the annual shop, he sounds a bit like a kid at Christmas.

"It's pretty good to go shopping. It's pretty exciting," he says.

"The first thing I do is get some steaks and get some ice-creams and yoghurts, all those beaut things."

Some of those items he'll keep in a little freezer he powers with solar rechargeable batteries, and some he'll leave in the large freezers on his trawler friends' boats.

Largely though, he's shopping for a year's supply of rice — 50 kilos — and pasta — 20 kilos — as well as "olive oil, crushed garlic, ginger, chilli, sweet chilli sauces".

"Things that I can't make or get," he says.

An annual shop provides the chance to stock up on supplies like rice and pasta. ( Supplied: Alvaro Cerezo )

'I miss my family'

Living on the island has forced David to deal with challenges beyond those relating to everyday survival.

It's a life that means living away from family, including his 21-year-old son, and an older daughter who's never visited the island.

David's third child took her own life about six years ago, something he describes as "incredibly difficult".

"She was getting on top of her life, and she was about to be recharged as I have — she was a female version of me, basically," he says.

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New rifts in his family have formed following his daughter's death and David says a major motivation to write his book was "to try and repair my family relationships … because they're really complicated and messy".

He says he feels somewhat disconnected from his family, but in the future hopes to travel more regularly to remedy that.

"My direct family, other than when my daughter died, I've not seen them. It's no point having these issues unresolved, and I miss my family," he says.

"My daughter's got a son I've never met. I've never seen him … I find that really hurtful and tough.

"But you've got to be patient and I've learnt patience."

It's just another lesson the island has offered him.