Sydney, Jan 14 (DPA) Applications are in from Mongolia, Croatia and even the Vatican for a dream job on offer in an advertising campaign run by Australian tourism authorities.The successful applicant gets a six-figure pay packet and rent-free luxury accommodation for six months as the caretaker of a paradise island on the Great Barrier Reef.

There have been more than a million hits to the islandreefjob.com website advertising the token position and more than 350 people have already submitted the mandatory 60-second video clip begging for an interview.

“It’s going to be the best tourism campaign,” said a gleeful Queensland Tourism Minister Desley Boyle, “because apart from actually filling the job, we then have all the follow-through publicity there’ll be with the shortlist of applicants being flown to the Whitsundays.”

She expects more than 10,000 applications before the Feb 22 closing date. Eleven short-listed candidates will get round-trip airfares for the final interviews in May and the winner a further set of tickets for the July 1 start.

“It’s a real job and it’s a pretty good package,” Boyle said tongue-in-cheek.

It’s not a real job at all, but part of a million-dollar tourism promotion campaign that will see one lucky jobseeker with the holiday of a lifetime.

Boyle said the successful candidate would have demonstrated an “adventurous attitude” and a willingness to complete a “few minor tasks” like feeding the fish and collecting the mail.

She claimed Australia’s Washington embassy had been besieged by United States citizens wanting to lodge applications.

The islandreefjob website had repeatedly crashed under the weight of international interest stoked by a bittern northern hemisphere winter and a global economic downturn.