The islands of the Furneaux Group are a quiet place of ancient rituals, with stunning scenery and a violent history.
Huddled in the unforgiving Bass Strait is a remote cluster of islands with fewer than 900 residents. The Furneaux Group is a quiet place of ancient rituals, with stunning scenery and a violent history.
TASMANIAN SONGMAN Ronnie Summers was to play some traditional Cape Barren music at 3pm in the afternoon. But the Killiecrankie gig was rescheduled to earlier in the day on account of the traffic. However, rather than the Melbourne gridlock I’d encountered en route to the airport for the one-hour flight to Flinders Island, the traffic here is zoological, with wombats, Bennett’s wallabies, Tasmanian pademelons and potoroos blocking gravel roads.
The prolific wildlife on this fox-free island is particularly animated in the early morning and late afternoon, as we crawl along in our hire car at 20km/h. The hamlet of Killiecrankie (population 15 in winter) is 40km north of Whitemark, the administrative centre of Flinders Island and our temporary abode, meaning a two-hour journey home if Ronnie rocks on past 5pm.
The venue for the jam session is Killiecrankie’s Deep Bite Cafe – dubbed Deep Pockets by locals – the only eatery at the northern end of 65km-long Flinders Island. Flinders is the largest of the Furneaux Group of more than 60 islands and rocky islets scattered across eastern Bass Strait. While a serve of fish and chips at Deep Bite might have set you back $30, it’s worth it for grandstand views of Killiecrankie Bay, a crescent of chalk-white sands with a towering backdrop of granite peaks.
Ronnie – a descendant of Mannalargenna, the last leader of the Trawlwoolway people of north-eastern Tasmania – sings of nearby Cape Barren Island, his childhood home, and of the moonbirds (muttonbirds) that Tasmanian Aboriginal people have harvested for untold generations.
Tourists strolling in for coffee are delighted to happen upon Ronnie’s toe-tapping mix of Cajun, blues and folk. They’re among the fortunate few who have discovered this Tasmanian outpost that still feels a long way from anywhere, despite being just a short hop from Melbourne and a 35-minute flight from Launceston.
“My grandfather used to say, ‘I don’t know if it’s the damned or the damned lucky who come to Flinders Island,’” says Lois Ireland, a third-generation islander who runs Bowman’s General Store in Whitemark. Along with Walker’s Supermarket and the Interstate Hotel – over the road and next door respectively – Bowman’s lies at the commercial heart of the island.
As with many young islanders, Lois moved to mainland Australia for educational and work opportunities. But Flinders reeled her back in when she was 35. “At first I needed to leave for a week every couple of months. But not now. Your needs change, your world becomes different.”
Arriving at Flinders is like stepping back in time. There are no fast-food outlets, no bright lights and no roar of traffic – just the call of Cape Barren geese. Sometimes the only traffic in Whitemark’s main street is a single kelpie sunning itself by the pub. At Lois’s store, employee Kate Mooney (famous locally for rearing orphaned baby wombats) can often be found cuddling one in-between sorting newspapers.
STRADDLING 40 º SOUTH – smack in the middle of the Roaring Forties – Flinders is dominated by the granite mountains and ridges of the Darling Range (including the 783m Strzelecki Peaks), and is fringed by 100 largely deserted beaches.
The Furneaux Group is the remnants of a land bridge that once joined Tasmania to the Australian mainland, and the peaks became islands after the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years ago. Alongside Flinders, the largest are Cape Barren Island (47,840ha, population 85) and Clarke Island (8230ha, and no permanent residents). Evidence of Aboriginal history reaches back some 40,000 years, but the group is named after Captain Tobias Furneaux, an English navigator who sighted some of the islands in 1773, but mistook them for mainland Australia.
Across the islands, coastal dunes and woodlands are home to more than 150 species of bird, from the endangered forty-spotted pardalote and satin flycatcher to the wandering albatross, and some 800 plant species. Although visitors to Flinders Island (population 700, making up some 90 per cent of Furneaux Group residents) are on the rise – now up to about 6500 – Lois says some locals have mixed feelings about sightseers disturbing their agrarian peace. “They fear the next tourist will catch the last fish,” she says.
That’s hardly likely: fishing charter Flinders Island Adventures takes visitors to the temperate waters of the continental shelf, 25 nautical miles away, where they hook the likes of striped marlin, yellow-fin tuna, blue-eye trevalla and hapuka (New Zealand groper). Closer to shore, anglers reel in gummy and school shark, snapper, flathead and Australian salmon, and divers and crabbers harvest abalone, scallops, giant crabs and crayfish.
Crayfishing tours are new to the itinerary of charter operator Chris ‘Rockjaw’ Rhodes, and are already a successful venture if the 4.5kg monster he pulls from the fridge is anything to go by. We meet him at the coastal village of Lady Barron for the 10-minute boat trip to Vansittart Island, which he manages.
Although the 800ha landmass is usually uninhabited, there’s a cottage where Chris’s guests can sojourn in solitude. While Flinders has accommodation ranging from self-contained houses to a
The island was settled... by sealer John Smith and his Aboriginal wife, Pleenperrenna.
camping ground, this basic cottage is the only other accommodation in the Furneaux Group available to the public.
Originally known as Gun Carriage Island, Vansittart is crisscrossed by stone walls. Crumbling brick chimneys facing Bates Bay – an arc of powdery sands lapped by turquoise waters – are all that remain of a post office and store that once made Vansittart the epicentre of the islands. In the distance lie the lavender-hued hills of Ronnie Summers’ childhood home.
Chris keeps several quad bikes on the island, and we clamber aboard for a turn around Vansittart’s hills and dales. The island was settled from 1820 by sealer John Smith and his Aboriginal wife, Pleenperrenna. She and other Aboriginal women who lived here lit fires at the top of Gun Carriage Hill to send smoke signal messages to their clans people at Mt William on Tasmania’s north-eastern coast.
At the peak, a brisk wind whips across dense tussock grass as we take in the same 360 º view that Pleenperrenna would have had of mainland Tasmania, Flinders Island’s Strzelecki Peaks, and nearby Great Dog and Tin Kettle islands. Vansittart’s darkest hour came in April 1831 when 53 dispossessed Tasmanian Aborigines were moved to the island by their ‘protector’, the bricklayer-turned-missionary George Augustus Robinson. At least 10 died here before Robinson transported them to Flinders Island eight months later.
We are led across sheep-dotted fields to historic gravestones and the foundations of several cottages and gardens.At the eastern end of the island lies one of more than 1000 vessels known to have been lost in Tasmanian waters, the iron skeleton of the barque Farsund, driven by heavy gales onto the Vansittart Shoals in 1912.
Back at the cottage, as we demolish the succulent crayfish, yarns abound about the Furneaux Group, dating from the swashbuckling days of sealers who settled here from 1798. Chris relates the tale of John Riddle, who lived on Vansittart from 1832.The story goes that in 1868, at the age of 84, British-born Riddle married 14-year-old Theodocia Harley.Two years later she gave birth to a son Riddle claimed wasn’t his. However, he was ordered to pay 15 shillings a week to support them. He said he’d rather rot in jail. And he did, dying in Hobart Gaol a few years later.
AS WE CLIMB ABOARD Chris’s boat Roxette the following day we spot some people picnicking at Bates Bay. “They’re muttonbirders,” says Chris, waving to them as we zoom back to Lady Barron. Puffinus tenuirostris, known to ornithologists as the short-tailed shearwater, and traditionally as yolla or moonbird to Aboriginal people, is considered Australia’s most abundant seabird. Migratory birds that breed on headlands and islands around Tasmania from September to April, they make an annual round trip of about 30,000km between the Arctic and south-eastern Australia.
About 18 million muttonbirds arrive in Tasmania each year to breed in 167 colonies. Adult birds, which can live up to 38 years, return to the same burrow – and the same mate – throughout their lifetime.
Aboriginal people have harvested moonbirds and their eggs for generations, and many Furneaux families continue this important cultural and economic practice. During the harvesting season, which was mid-April on our visit, birders reach into burrows to pull out chicks – although sometimes they find a tiger or copperhead snake instead. The meat of the birds is beloved by locals, and oil from it is rich in omega-3 fatty acids.The excitement of the season is tangible: wherever we go – Walker’s Supermarket, Freckles Cafe in Whitemark, the Furneaux Tavern in Lady Barron – the talk is of birding.
Moonbirds are an acquired taste – like an oily fish – and to me they taste something like anchovy, crossed with duck. They have a pungent, castor oil-like smell during cooking, and Lois Ireland, landlady of our Whitemark cottage, asks us to cook the bird we buy from Flinders Island Meat outside.
HELEN CASSIDY’S WASABI ice cream is more to our liking. We meet the horticulturist at two large greenhouses in the island’s south, where she grows organic fruit and vegetables year-round in spectacular environs – the granite summit of Strzelecki Peaks looms over the property. Just down the road is Trousers Point Beach, a secluded cove of silver sand surrounded by great granite boulders daubed with orange Caloplaca lichen – evidence of the pure air in the Roaring Forties.
Helen’s bountiful wasabi crop has been praised by celebrity chefs Shannon Bennett and Kylie Kwong, and Wasabia japonica, which is significantly less bracing than the imitation wasabi (usually a mix of mustard and horseradish) that typically comes with sushi, is becoming almost as popular as muttonbird.
“The wasabi flowered last week and it was all over the island’s Facebook page,” says Helen. She is property manager at Mountain Seas Retreat, regarded as the island’s classiest accommodation.
Although Flinders is a mere 65km long and 30km from east to west, locals travel “up north” or “down south” for camping holidays. From Whitemark, we head 14km “down south” for a few days at Mountain Seas, which caters for up to 20
people housed in rooms and one self-contained cottage. Visitors comb beaches for paper nautilus shells, cycle scenic roads, and hike the Strzelecki Peaks Walk, a 5.6km return trek to the summit through fern gullies and slopes of she-oak, tea-tree and Tasmanian blue gum.
At Mountain Seas, guests are spoilt by resident chef Anne-Maree Wilkins, who incorporates Helen’s fresh produce in seasonal dishes that include free-range wallaby and Flinders Island milk-fed lamb. A former mainland Tasmanian, Anne-Mareew as “besotted” with Flinders on her first visit, and moved to the island in 2007. She joins others who have found their personal Shangri-la here, including author Dave Freer.
South African-born Dave was a marine biologist before turning his hand to writing, and has since published more than 20 novels, the majority science fiction. “My wife, Barbara, and I attended a few science-fiction conferences in Australia and did some travelling in between,” he says. “We really liked Tasmania. But when we stepped off the plane at Whitemark, Barbara said straight away, ‘We’ll live here.’”
We meet the couple, who moved to Flinders in 2010, at the Whitemark Hall, where they join a Scottish dancing ceilidh, one of a surprising whirl of weekly social events. “Because Flinders is so isolated, people turn to each other more than they do in a city. The pace of life might be slower here, but the social life is amazing.”
An avid diver and climber, Dave says the islands feature a treasure-trove of hidden attractions. “Off the coast of Babel Island are a series of limestone caves that make for incredible diving, a little-known world few people have seen.” He says a
favourite climbing area, The Docks, is “heart-tearingly beautiful”.
Becoming expert at avoiding the island’s always-present wildlife, I explore silent beaches sparkling with incredible shades of turquoise, bird-filled wetlands, and an epic 34km stretch of sand on the wave-pounded east coast.
Driving on gravel roads we pass farmlands created in 1950s soldier settlement schemes, particularly at Memana and Lackrana, and wander around Wybalenna, a lonely vale on the island’s west coast that still feels haunted by the ill-fated Tasmanian Aboriginals forced to live there from 1833.
WEARE DRAWN back to Killiecrankie, debating whether it’s the island’s most beautiful beach – other contenders are Fotheringate Beach and Trousers Point. While there we visit jazz singer Judy Jacques and partner, musician Sandro Donati – he accompanied Ronnie at the Killiecrankie gig – who are Victorian émigrés to Flinders Island. Judy chanced upon the islands in 1998 when researching her family’s history, which revealed several lighthouse keepers who kept lonely vigils at some wind-swept Furneaux outposts in the 19th century.
“When I first visited I was blown away by the luminous light, the pure air – everything,” says Judy, whose career spans five decades. “I had to return.” The couple purchased their 125ha Killiecrankie property – a primordial Eden of unspoilt bush teeming with wildlife – in 2004, and moved to the island permanently in 2011.
They hadn’t been there long before joining forces with Flinders Council to establish the Furneaux Islands Festival, an annual event celebrating the region’s communities, shared cultures and rich musical history held on the Australia Day weekend.
Potoroos and wallabies dash across the road as we drive towards the muttonbird viewing platform at Port Davies, near the hamlet of Emita. A cloud of moonbirds swoops towards their burrows as the sun sets across a sapphire sea.
In the utter beauty of the moment I remember a ballad Ronnie Summers sang at the Killiecrankie concert: “We’ll walk the path of the moonbird, the mountains will touch the sky.” We’re the only visitors at Port Davies, and this seems right; like the locals, we’ve grown accustomed to the serenity.
Ed’s note: Sadly, the Deep Bite Cafe closed after our writer and photographer visited, but before this issue went to press.
“When I first visited I was blown away by the luminous light, the pure air – everything.”