Sydney, March 3 (DPA) More than 34,000 applicants learned Tuesday they hadn’t made the shortlist of 50 candidates for the dream job of highly paid caretaker on a paradise island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
The unlucky 34,634 are left clinging to the hope of being the sole wildcard entry when the final 11 contestants are selected and flown to Queensland’s Hamilton Island in early May.

The Top 50 are from Britain, the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, Greece, India, China and 14 other countries.

Queensland Tourism Minister Desley Boyle said they made it through the first round on the creativity of their 60-second video-clip applications.

“There’s everything from action and adventure, comedy, animation and a choreographed musical number that just stays with you,” Boyle said. “What it boiled down to,” she said, “was the motivation and professionalism of the applicants and their ‘fit’ with the job and Tourism Queensland.”

Hailey Turner, one of five Australians shortlisted, said it was likely that a foreigner rather than a local would be the one to start caretaking July 1.

“People said to me ‘don’t hold your breath’ because I knew the (contest) was designed to attract overseas tourists,” Turner said.

Like many of the women who applied, Turner was bikini-clad in her application for the six-month posting. If successful, she’ll be required to clean a swimming pool, feed fish and relay to the world her impressions of Hamilton as a holiday destination.

Achim, a 23-year-old university student from the state of Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany, appeared in his bath and wisely played up his computer skills.

The job, though real, is essentially a tourism promotion campaign and the better the blogger the better the chances of the applicant.

Bavaria’s Mirjam, the other German to make the shortlist, made much of “being in a good shape” and being “up for lots of adventure.”