Shucking into Chrimbo

No man is an island, or so they say. But I felt like one last week, miles from home, floating free, as offshore as it was possible to be.

I’d taken my Christmas break early, on an island off an island off an island. I flew to mainland Australia, then Tasmania, then took the Mirambeena Ferry near Hobart, steaming across dolphin-heavy seas to Bruny Island.

I was a guest of Pennicott Wilderness Journeys, who’ve won so many tourism awards, they had to build a bigger mantelpiece. Their mission? To drive my family around all day through gobsmacking scenery, stopping only to feed our faces.

Merry Christmas to me. I was an entertainment writer entertaining himself for a change, sampling the delights of a remote region where you couldn’t throw a boomerang without hitting an artisan producer.

We pulled into a roadside joint called Get Shucked and hoed into huge platters of oysters. I pigged out on local brie at Bruny Island Cheeses, made with milk squeezed from the sunburnt udders of cows grazing just over yonder.

Would I like a local beer with that? Why not? ‘‘It’s always 5 o’clock on Bruny,’’ said our driver Mani, whose sense of humour was dry as the Nullarbor Plain.

Stingybark and bluegum, tea tree and myrtle. We hooned along though farmland and bush, the weather veering wildly between sun, gusty wind, and cloudbursts of rain. ‘‘If you don’t like the weather here, come back in 10 minutes,’’ said Mani.

North and South Bruny are connected by a skinny streak of land called The Neck, where two beaches run parallel. We hoofed up endless wooden steps to the lookout, past the nests of shearwaters and fairy penguins, and gasped at the beauty of the place.

We pulled into Adventure Bay, previously explored by captains Furneaux, Bligh, and Cook, now a cluster of baches hunched beneath the gums.

You can stand on the beach here and watch humpbacks mooch past, and someone had made a sculpture to celebrate that fact: a giant metal globe with a whale at the centre. A big metal cut-out of Australia took pride of place, but Aotearoa was conspicuous by its absence. ‘‘New Zealand fell off two weeks after that sculpture went up,’’ said Mani. ‘‘But no one ever bothered to weld it back on.’’

On the wind-battered south coast stood the village of Alonnah, with a teensy police station and Australia’s southern-most pub. ‘‘We only have one policeman,’’ said Mani. ‘‘Justin.’’

We ate delicious fudge, quaffed local pinot noir and single malt whisky, wolfed down Bruny-reared sausages and lamb. We dug into honeypots, and tasted the sweet distillation bees had made from the flowers of leatherwood and fennel, blue gum and prickly box.

There was no respite from great tucker. Even at the ferry terminal in the late arvo, a local entrepreneur could be found hawking homesmoked fish from a roadside garage.

I bought a slab of smoked trout to take back to the mainland.

There was no respite from great tucker. Even at the ferry terminal in the late arvo, a local entrepreneur could be found hawking homesmoked fish.